The former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley reportedly exchanged 1,200 emails with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein over four years, some of which featured unexplained terms such as “snow white”.

The report detailing the cache of emails comes less than two weeks after Staley resigned from Barclays after being shown the preliminary conclusions of a regulatory investigation over his links to Epstein.

Staley developed a relationship with Epstein in 2000, when he was hired to lead JP Morgan’s private bank, which handles wealthy clients.

That relationship continued after Staley left JP Morgan, where he had spent 30 years of his career, to join BlueMountain Capital in 2013.

But the banker claims their contact started to taper off after he left the Wall Street lender, with the two men meeting for a final time in 2015, when Staley took his own yacht, the Bequia, to visit Epstein’s private Caribbean island.

Staley volunteered to explain his ties to Epstein to Barclays in summer 2019, when media reports cast a fresh spotlight on their relationship.