Death of Whistleblower Who Exposed Howard Lutnick's Ties to Jeffrey Epstein Sparks Watchdog Probe: Report

A British watchdog group has launched a probe after the suicide of the man who exposed emails exchanged between disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and current U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.

The Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (BFCA) said it will examine its interactions with whistleblower Simon Andriesz and evaluate how it works with whistleblowers and other vulnerable people going forward.

“We are very sorry to hear of Mr. Andriesz’s death," an FCA spokespoerson said in a statement. "Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Since expressing our condolences, we have asked Lea Paterson, who has just joined our board as a non-executive director, to review how we interacted with Mr. Andriesz to learn any lessons for the future.”

The FCA said that it expects the probe to be completed by the end of the year and provide recommendations for how to best support whistleblowers in the future.

Andriesz's representative, John Robertson, said, “Simon spent years trying to get people to listen. The tragedy is that the serious questions are only being asked now that he is gone.”

Andriesz, a British banker who once worked under Lutnick, died months after he alerted the House Oversight Committee of emails Epstein and Lutnick exchanged in 2018 about a digital advertising company they were both invested in called Adfin.

Andriesz discovered the email chain in the millions of Epstein files released by the Department of Justice. He told the BBC that he searched Lutnick's initials, "HWL," knowing from his time as his employee at BGC Partners that Lutnick preferred to sign his emails that way.

The emails, exchanged in May 2018, find Epstein asking Lutnick about how Adfin is doing, to which Lutnick says the company is finally turning a profit. Epstein then asks Lutnick about buying a guest house, but Lutnick says the house is four years away from being built.

The exchange between Epstein and Lutnick isn't scandalous in itself, but its existence contradicts the 65-year-old secretary's public statements about when he cut off his relationship with the notorious trafficker.

In 2025, Lutnick told the New York Post that he met Epstein in 2005 when they were neighbors, but claimed he soon "cut off contact" with Epstein after being creeped out by a massage parlor in the financier's Manhattan home.

However, the emails suggest that Lutnick and Epstein remained in close contact for over a decade, well after Epstein was arrested in 2008 for prostitution charges, and up to at least a year before Epstein was arrested for trafficking in 2019, the same year as his suicide.

At a May 2026 hearing in front of the House Oversight Committee, Lutnick claimed he only discovered Epstein was an investor in Adfin when the files were released.

Andriesz had tried to get the FBI to look into Lutnick's ties to Esptein before.

In 2020 and 2021, he had interviews with the FBI in which he alleged that Lutnick had undisclosed business ties to the financier. The FBI declined to investigate at the time.

Andriesz also made the explosive claim that while CEO of BGC, Lutnick signed off on a scheme to divert payments to brokers in order to cover the fees associated with a sexual harassment claim fired by a young female employee at the firm.

“I have little doubt Mr. Lutnick, as a hands-on CEO, personally signed off on the sexual harassment settlement and associated legal costs,” Andriesz said in an interview with Daily Beast-affiliated Substack PunchUp. “Not only that, I do not believe for a moment that Mr. Lutnick was unaware the substantial liabilities were being quietly deducted from brokers’ bonus pools.”