JEFFREY Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell made more than $100 billion together but the vast fortune may be hidden from victims in mystery offshore accounts, the pedophile’s former mentor has claimed.
While the Epstein estate has been valued at $635 million, his old boss Steven Hoffenberg dismisses that amount and says it’s more likely to be over $100 billion.
Hoffenberg, who was the criminal mastermind between the pair fleecing hundreds of millions out of investors in one of the world’s biggest Ponzi schemes, took Epstein under his wings in the eighties, teaching him everything about forensic accounting.
The 75-year-old said that even in the late eighties and early nineties, while working for his company Towers Financial, he and Epstein were laundering at least $2.5 billion-a-year and had other sideline fraudulent businesses laundering a similar amount.
Hoffenberg claimed that Epstein and his alleged pimp Ghislaine Maxwell were working together for more than twenty years and made over $100 billion, but only a small portion of the vast fortune has been declared publicly – which lawyers for the estate’s executor strongly refute.
In an exclusive interview, Hoffenberg, a former owner of the New York Post, claims he has inside knowledge of the whole operation between Epstein, Maxwell and their inner circle.
“I know the methods they used to hide the money,” he told The Sun.
“We have to do the good guys’ work for them in explaining where the billions are and how they got there from the poisonous monetary tree, the dots are not being connected.
“The billions are in accounts all around the world that have not been exposed. There’s been a way to store it and obstruct people finding out.
“The FBI’s role is to investigate, but they have not done forensic auditing on Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s financial crimes and understand the methods used by them. They haven’t got near to this, that’s not their purpose.
“That’s what experts can provide, like myself, who know first-hand what they’re doing, who can work for the good guys instead of the bad guys, where there are plenty of experts. I can assist the lawyers in the inner workings of their investments.”
Lawyers representing a co-executor of the Epstein estate, have strongly refuted the claims saying they are “untrue” and “incredulous”.
“After spending 18 years behind bars for being a fraudster Hoffenberg is not a reliable source and his story is completely false,” Daniel Weiner of Hughes, Hubbard & Reeds, said.
“To say his estate is worth $100 billion dollars is insane – that would put him as the third richest person in the world before he died.
“All of Epstein’s assets were publicly disclosed back in February and it was $636 million.
“Since then there has been multiple millions paid in taxes and another inventory will come out next month, which will be even lower. “
Hoffenberg – a born-again Christian who is helping in the legal cases of Epstein’s rape victims – is considered Epstein’s original ‘mentor’ after making him his right-hand man while he was CEO of the collection agency, Towers Financial.
Hoffenberg was introduced to Epstein by a mutual friend, British arms dealer Sir Douglas Leese, whom Epstein was working for in London.
He says Epstein came to him broke and together they made hundreds of millions working on a Ponzi scheme to syphon off company funds instead of paying investors.
The pair would have daily conversations about the art of manipulating people for financial and political gain – now he says he knows everything about Epstein’s inner circle, where and how they’re hiding the colossal fortune.
“The good guys don’t understand, there’s no detailed methods out there explaining the billions of dollars of criminality, the unjust enrichment of this group of people,” he said.
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“Billions are hidden, I can tell you that Jeffrey Epstein was very involved in Towers Financial. He raised a billion dollars on Wall St and did $1.5 billion in collections, that’s $2.5 billion a year in financial crimes.
“Maxwell and Epstein were involved in over $3 billion of crimes a year in other businesses. This is over 20 years of financial manipulation of at least $5.5 billion-a-year. That’s an enormous amount of money.
“It’s a tragedy for the victims – the girls, the financial victims, the blackmailed people, this is a terrible story. There’s a long list of people that are the bad guys, that have to be brought to justice.”
Maxwell, 58, has been has been charged with six counts of sex trafficking and perjury over her relationship with Epstein and is due to stand trial next week.
She wept as she was denied bail at a hearing earlier this month.
The Sun reached out to lawyers for Maxwell for comment.
