ROTHSCHILD BANK RAIDED: The UN Diplomat at the Center of It All — and What the Documents Actually Show
Three days after Jeffrey Epstein collected $10 million from the Rothschild bank, he directed $250,000 from his Virgin Islands account to a UN official’s personal credit union — routed through a diplomat now under French criminal investigation.
This investigation is part of the Epstein Files series.
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WSJ reports: On March 24, 2026, French police raided the Paris offices of Edmond de Rothschild, one of Europe’s oldest and most powerful private banking dynasties. The target: Fabrice Aidan — a French diplomat, former EdR employee, and the man whose hundreds of emails with Jeffrey Epstein, released by the Department of Justice in January 2026 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, had triggered an uproar in France severe enough to prompt the foreign minister to call the facts “extremely serious.”
French financial prosecutor Pascal Prache confirmed the raids and announced that authorities are examining whether Aidan was involved in the corruption of a foreign public official. The official’s identity was not disclosed.
Every outlet covering the raid described the same thing: a diplomat with suspicious Epstein contact. A bank seeking to distance itself from a dead sex offender. A French investigation just getting started.
None of them had the documents.
What follows is what the documents actually show. Every claim in this piece is anchored to a public EFTA Bates number retrievable at justice.gov/epstein. Every email is quoted verbatim. Every wire transfer is sourced to its SWIFT record. Readers, investigators, and congressional staff can pull every document cited here directly from the federal archive.
This is not a story about suspicious contact. It is a story about a system — and the UN diplomat who was one of its essential nodes.
I. THE DINNER THAT ALMOST HAPPENED
On the evening of January 25, 2011, Fabrice Aidan sent Jeffrey Epstein an urgent message from his United Nations email address.
“Sh abdallah accepts the dinner with b gates. They need urgently a phone number for protocol coordination.” (EFTA_R1_01338719)
Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan — UAE Foreign Minister, brother to the Crown Prince, whose family controls approximately one trillion dollars in sovereign assets — had accepted a dinner invitation. The dinner was to be with Bill Gates. The invitation had been extended on Epstein’s behalf. The intermediary was a serving UN diplomat operating from his official UN address.
Within the hour, the UAE Foreign Minister’s personal assistant, Mohamed Mahmoud Al Khaja, had written to Boris Nikolic — Bill Gates’s chief science and technology advisor, operating through Gates’s private office bgC3 — to confirm the logistics. “I am the assistant of HH Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed and I was informed by Mr. Fabrice Aidan that HH is invited for dinner tomorrow night. I would like to confirm HH attendance and would appreciate if you could provide us the timing, location, and dress code for the event at the earliest possible.” (EFTA_R1_00142308)
Nikolic had not been briefed. He forwarded the message to Epstein and wrote: “Please can we discuss it tomorrow morning? I need to know more before inviting him.” (EFTA_R1_01337844)
It was past midnight. Epstein wrote back immediately.
“of course. sorry, i had asked his friend, if he might like to go.. next thing i know, my iphone is ringing off the hook.. Abdullah is brother to the crown prince, he is the foreign minister. his brother controls the 1 trillion dollars of assets... he abdullah is very interested in nuclear energy for his country. he is young and fun, and is the most energetic of all the gulfies. Sorry if this has become a headache for you. I won’t be up until noon. if you can call me in the next half hour i will stay awake.” (EFTA00902867)
Epstein had extended a dinner invitation to a sitting Gulf foreign minister — in Bill Gates’s name, through a UN diplomat — without Gates’s own science advisor knowing the full picture. When the UAE FM’s protocol machinery activated within hours, Nikolic was learning about it from the Foreign Minister’s assistant’s confirmation request.
The dinner was cancelled. Gates was still in the UAE, delayed by logistics. Nikolic wrote to Al Khaja the following morning to stand down, offering to meet Sheikh Abdullah personally in lieu of the dinner. (EFTA_R1_00135327)
Epstein’s message to Aidan when the cancellation was confirmed was three words.
“sorry, no good deed.” (EFTA00902889)
Three months later, in February 2011, Epstein and JPMorgan’s most senior executives launched Project Molecule — a proposal to create a permanent, offshore-capable donor-advised fund anchored by the Gates name, designed to capture capital from Giving Pledge signatories. The Gulf sovereign wealth dimension of that architecture had a documented antecedent. The relationship between Epstein, Gates’s science office, and the UAE’s leadership had been under active development for months.
