Douglas Leese

Douglas Leese (1923–2011) was a London-born defense contractor widely reported to have operated as an independent arms broker. Parliamentary records place Leese in the money-flow of the £40 billion Al-Yamamah fighter-jet package negotiated for BAE Systems with Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s.¹

Multiple investigative accounts add that he worked alongside Saudi fixer Adnan Khashoggi on that and earlier deals and later introduced Jeffrey Epstein to financier-fraudster Steven Hoffenberg in 1987, branding Epstein "a genius" while arranging a $25,000-a-month consulting retainer.²³

These intersecting threads — big-ticket weapons sales, offshore finance, and covert networking — explain how Leese sits at the nexus of Epstein's early money-making and Khashoggi's oil-for-arms milieu.

A newer tranche of reporting and first-person recollection via Julian Leese adds a more granular mechanism for the Leese–Epstein connection: Epstein did not merely "meet" the Leese family through arms-trade circles, but, at least by the late 1980s, actively leveraged them as a bridge into Towers Financial's international bond-sales machine — pulling Julian Leese into sales efforts that later collapsed into scandal and personal fallout.⁴⁵

  Biography & Career Snapshot

  Relationship Matrix

  Epstein Thread

TrueHoop, Daily Kos, and Vanity Fair each quote Hoffenberg describing how Leese praised Epstein's skill at "selling securities," secured the monthly fee, and floated arms-trade ventures where "morals would not impede profit."¹⁰¹³¹¹

Social-graph databases such as LittleSis list Leese as Epstein's early sponsor and denote a "protégé" link.¹⁴ A 2023 crowd-sourced open-source-intelligence map further traces shared offshore entities — Butterfield Bank (Bermuda) and shell companies in the Caymans — used by both men.¹⁵

A more detailed (and operationally specific) account of the Leese–Epstein link appears in a reproduced long-form investigation that states Epstein contacted Julian Leese in 1988 and offered him an internship at Towers Financial — despite Julian's father's "enduring anger" at Epstein.⁴ The internship assignment was not generic finance work: Julian was placed into the bond-raising effort, helping sell what the account describes as fraudulent Towers bonds to international investors; Julian later said he introduced Hoffenberg to his father, who then introduced Hoffenberg to potential bond buyers.⁴

That same account adds the personal-damage vector the earlier open-source summaries tend to omit: Julian said he sold Towers securities to people close to him, including his godparents, and later described the episode succinctly as "a disaster" — a reputational and relational blow that maps cleanly onto the "enduring anger" reference.⁴

The same narrative also situates the Leese family as part of Epstein's early social-capital acquisition strategy after he left Bear Stearns: it describes a period in which Julian and his family "taught a young Epstein to shoot and to mix with aristocrats," and later recounts a 1999 visit in which Epstein greeted Julian at his Manhattan townhouse with an I-told-you-so flourish ("My boy … I told you I would make it very big").⁴⁵

Taken together, the implication is not merely that Leese introduced Epstein to Hoffenberg, but that Epstein then exploited the Leese family as an international distribution channel for Towers' fundraising — pulling Julian into sales, widening the buyer net through Douglas, and externalizing the damage onto the Leeses when Towers' fraud imploded.⁴¹¹

  Khashoggi Thread

Al-Yamamah evidence is first-party: Hansard details secret commissions channelled "through a British businessman, Douglas Leese."¹

LittleSis, investigative blogs, and recent activist archives agree that Khashoggi and Leese ran parallel lobbying for Western and Saudi buyers, earning eight-figure fees each.³¹⁶

Analysts note this same Khashoggi network later surfaces in Epstein's 1980s Middle-East travel — e.g., his Austrian passport listing a Saudi address — suggesting Leese bridged the circles.¹³

  Towers Financial & Julian Leese

Independent of Hoffenberg's later retrospective claims, contemporaneous legal and journalistic summaries of Towers establish the core mechanics Julian would have been inserted into: Towers raised hundreds of millions via bonds and notes during the relevant period, and later collapsed as a major Ponzi-style fraud; Epstein was documented as a paid consultant and was repeatedly described by participants and investigators as involved in capital-raising and related transactions.¹⁷

Within that broader Towers context, the Julian Leese episode functions as a concrete "how" for the Leese–Epstein bridge: Epstein recruits Julian, Julian sells internationally, Julian introduces Hoffenberg to Douglas, Douglas introduces buyers — an explicit chain of interpersonal leverage that is legible even if one brackets more speculative intelligence-adjacency claims.⁴¹⁷

  Selected Timeline

  Key Takeaways Table

Most open-source documentation rests on parliamentary records and interviews with Hoffenberg; primary corporate records remain sealed, leaving finer-grained money-flows opaque.

  Footnotes

1. Al-Yamamah Arms Deal Debate, Hansard ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Steven Hoffenberg, Wikipedia ↩

3. Khashoggi–Leese Relationship, LittleSis ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Julian Leese investigation, WltzngMatVan ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

5. Pattinson podcast: Julian Leese ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Douglas Leese: Arms Dealer and Epstein Mentor, Novus Confidential ↩ ↩²

7. Bribes and Commissions in Al-Yamamah, TheyWorkForYou ↩

8. Jeffrey Epstein: Man in the Middle, PREVAIL ↩

9. Drop Site News: Leese & Epstein ↩ ↩²

10. Epstein's Former Business Partner Interview, TrueHoop ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

11. The Talented Mr. Epstein, Vanity Fair ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

12. Ghislaine Maxwell: Privilege, Power, Perversion, Inkshares ↩ ↩²

13. Epstein and Arms Dealers in the 1980s, Daily Kos ↩ ↩² ↩³

14. Douglas Leese Profile, LittleSis ↩

15. Epstein–Leese Offshore Links, Dr Subroto Roy on X ↩ ↩²

16. Khashoggi–Leese Network, Palestinian Youth Movement on X ↩

17. CBS News: Towers Financial, Epstein ↩ ↩² ↩³