- Charlie Javice began calling defense witnesses Thursday in the JPMorgan fraud trial in New York.
- Her first is Apollo’s Marc Rowan, an early investor and board member for her website, Frank.
- Rowan praised Javice and Frank, and testified he had little involvement in the JPMorgan merger.
Frank founder Charlie Javice kicked off her defense case with some firepower at her JPMorgan Chase fraud trial Thursday — calling private equity billionaire Marc Rowan to the witness stand.
The Apollo Global Management cofounder and CEO told a federal jury in Manhattan that he was an early investor and board member of Frank, explaining that he had been impressed with the student financial aid platform’s prospects and leadership.
“Favorable,” he said when asked for his first impression of the young entrepreneur, who was in her mid-20s when they met in 2017. “She seemed to have an interesting take on how to tackle the market.”
Rowan wore a black suit and white dress shirt — no tie — and sipped from a plastic water bottle as he spoke. He and Javice exchanged two-handed waves and broad smiles as he left the courtroom for Thursday’s lunch break.
After the break, Rowan was to continue under questioning by Javice’s attorney, Christopher Tayback of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
Rowan testified that he had little direct involvement in the 2021 JPMorgan merger at the center of the fraud case.
Federal prosecutors say Javice and codefendant Olivier Amar, her second in command at Frank, conspired to trick JPMorgan — the nation’s biggest bank — into paying $175 million for the website.
By the lunch break, Rowan had not been asked about the allegation that Javice and Amar fraudulently claimed to JPMorgan that Frank had the personal information for 4.25 Frank users — college and high school students who the bank was interested in marketing checking accounts and credit cards to.
He did recall that, in the first week of August 2021, he spoke with Javice about the scramble to meet JPMorgan’s pre-purchase demands for verification of Frank’s student dataset.
The two spoke about “how overwhelmed the company was in responding to this data request,” he testified.
Rowan started his testimony by describing his earliest involvement with the startup and Javice.
“It was really at the beginning of its journey,” Rowan told jurors.
The two had been introduced through one of his colleagues, who, like Rowan and Javice, had attended the Wharton School, he said.
Though he remained at arm’s length on the JPMorgan deal, Javice did share with him one early victory in the negotiations, he said. As part of the merger negotiations, she’d had a one-on-one with JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, Rowan said.
“She reported a very enthusiastic meeting with the CEO,” Rowan said with a smile.
