In a turn of events that would make even the most jaded gin-soaked cynic choke on their slice of lemon, billionaire Leon Black has emerged from a hearing in the Epstein affair with the sort of unearned insouciance normally reserved for cats in sunbeams. The man who once bought a $120 million Modigliani with what can only be described as 'creative accounting' has now added 'walking away from uncomfortable judicial scrutiny' to his repertoire of magical feats. British investigators, presumably having run out of biscuits from sheer frustration, are now demanding a degree of transparency that would be laughable if it weren't so utterly predictable in its absence.
Mr Black, a man whose face seems perpetually set to the expression of someone who has just smelled an improperly stored cheese, gave no comment as he shuffled past the press pack. His legal team, a phalanx of suits so expensive they could fund a small principality, offered the usual platitudes about cooperation and lack of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, across the pond, the British authorities are beating their chests like parodies of gorillas in a B-movie. They want answers, they want light shone into dark corners, they want the sort of transparency that only ever seems to be demanded of people who cannot afford to hire a team of libel lawyers to make such demands disappear.
This is, of course, the same Leon Black who paid a chunky $62 million to the US Virgin Islands to avoid a tax investigation. A man whose financial dealings have the complexity of a Jackson Pollock painting and the moral clarity of a foggy night in London. The Epstein connection? Ah, that old chestnut. It appears that Mr Black had the misfortune of being acquainted with the late financier, a man whose name is now synonymous with depravity. But as we all know, mere acquaintance in elite circles is not a crime. It is merely a lifestyle choice. And Mr Black has chosen to be very, very rich and very, very opaque.
The British investigators, bless their tweed-clad hearts, are insisting on a full accounting. They want to know what dinners were had, what hands were shaken, what offshore accounts might have been offered as party favours. But let us be honest. Transparency is a commodity traded in the same markets as derivatives and guilt. It is bought and sold, hedged and shorted. Mr Black has simply made a very successful investment in opacity.
Meanwhile, the public – that disenfranchised, gin- loving mass of humanity – is left to watch this pantomime with a sense of weary resignation. We know the script. The rich walk free, the questions remain unanswered, and the investigators issue press releases that will be filed away in the same dustbin of history as yesterday's Racing Post. The only certain outcome is that Mr Black will continue to amass wealth at a rate that would make a Victorian industrialist blush, and the British investigators will continue to write strongly worded letters that will be read by nobody of importance.
In the end, this is not a story about justice. It is a story about the absurd theatre of wealth. Leon Black is not a man to be tried. He is a man to be observed, like a rare species of tropical bird that shits gold. And the investigators? They are but the naturalists, forever taking notes while the bird flies away, cackling in a language only the truly wealthy can understand.
So raise a glass, dear reader. Fill it with something cheap and British, and toast to the glorious, grimy spectacle of it all. For as long as billionaires walk free from hearings, there will always be gin. And as long as there is gin, we shall have the fortitude to watch them go.
