Dechert

Dechert LLP is an American-founded international law firm. In October 2020 the three-member Conflicts Committee of Apollo Global Management's board retained it as independent counsel to investigate the relationship between Apollo co-founder Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein; its memorandum, dated January 22, 2021, was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an exhibit to Apollo's January 25, 2021 Form 8-K. The Senate Finance Committee under Ron Wyden opened its own investigation in June 2022 on the basis of "inconsistencies" in the report. In the United Kingdom, the High Court found in 2022 that a former Dechert partner, Neil Gerrard, had leaked a client's confidential material to the press and to the Serious Fraud Office.¹²³

The Apollo Investigation

Black asked for an outside review at an October 20, 2020 meeting of Apollo's board, and the Conflicts Committee engaged Dechert shortly afterward, placing, in the firm's words, "no restriction on Dechert's investigation." Over three months Dechert reviewed more than 60,000 documents collected from Black, Apollo, Black's family office Elysium Management, and Black's outside counsel Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Apollo's own counsel for the investigation was Milbank; Paul Weiss and Milbank assisted with document collection and access to witnesses. Dechert interviewed more than twenty witnesses, including Black, current and former Apollo employees, the co-founders Josh Harris and Marc Rowan, family-office staff and legal counsel. One former family-office employee declined to be interviewed.¹⁴

Findings

Dechert reported that Black paid Epstein 158 million dollars for work from 2012 through 2017: 50 million dollars for 2013, 70 million for 2014, 30 million for 2015, nothing for 2016 amid a fee dispute, and 8 million for 2017. It found that Epstein had told Black he generally charged clients 40 million dollars a year; that his first project, resolving a flaw in a 2006 Grantor Retained Annuity Trust that exposed Black's estate to an estimated 500 million dollars or more in tax, was called a "grand slam" by outside counsel; that Black and witnesses believed Epstein's advice conferred more than one billion and as much as two billion dollars in value; and that "the compensation paid by Black to Epstein far exceeded any amounts Black paid to his other professional advisors." It also recorded that many of Epstein's ideas "did not hold up under scrutiny."¹

The report documented Black's separate loans of 22.5 million and 8 million dollars in early 2017 from his entity BV70 LLC to Epstein's Plan D LLC, of which Epstein repaid 10 million dollars; Black's appointment of Epstein in 1997 as an initial director of the Black Family Foundation; and a 10 million dollar donation from Black to Epstein's Gratitude America in October 2015. It found that Epstein's Financial Trust Company bought 263,257 shares in Apollo's March 2011 initial public offering through a directed-share program, that the shares passed to Southern Financial LLC and were held through at least September 2019, and that Financial Trust Company had invested in AP SHL Investors LLC and AP Technology Partners LLC, vehicles formed by Apollo executives, and alongside Black's family in Environmental Solutions Worldwide. Dechert concluded that Black's and Apollo's public statements about the relationship were substantially accurate and that it had "seen no evidence that Black or any employee of the Family Office or Apollo was involved in any way with Epstein's criminal activities."¹

On the day of release Black told Apollo's limited partners that the report "confirms several important facts that were previously disclosed. Apollo did no business with Mr. Epstein," announced that he would step down as chief executive by July 2021, and disclosed that Apollo had separately engaged WilmerHale to review its reputational-risk practices.⁴

The Senate Challenge

The Senate Finance Committee stated on July 25, 2023 that its investigation "was prompted by inconsistencies in a report by the law firm Dechert LLP," and that Black's attorneys had since told the committee that the idea behind a transaction for which Black paid Epstein 20 million dollars "was in the public domain and originated with Black's other legal advisors."² On March 11, 2025 Wyden wrote that committee staff had found records of 12 million dollars in wires from Black to Epstein that the Apollo board's review did not identify, bringing the total to more than 170 million dollars, and that Black's attorneys had not explained the omission. The committee's August 2026 accounting listed 5.5 million dollars in 2012 and 6.3 million in 2016, years for which the Dechert schedule showed no fee payments.⁵⁶

ENRC and Neil Gerrard

From 2011 to 2013 Dechert partner Neil Gerrard led an internal investigation for the mining company Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) into its Kazakhstan subsidiary, which became the subject of a Serious Fraud Office criminal inquiry. In a judgment handed down on May 16, 2022, Mr Justice Waksman of the High Court found that Gerrard had recklessly breached his duties to ENRC, including by instigating leaks to the press and making unauthorised disclosures to the SFO, and that the SFO had breached its own duties in some of its contacts with him, while rejecting a claim of misfeasance in public office against SFO Director Richard Alderman. Dechert admitted one reckless breach by Gerrard during the trial and afterward said the findings described conduct "completely at odds" with the firm's values.³⁷