Simon Andriesz spent more than three decades inside the machine, a managing director at BGC Partners, the brokerage Howard Lutnick built and ran before he was handed the Commerce Department. Andriesz said he first flagged account irregularities inside the firm in 2016, a year before he was terminated in 2017, and later told the BBC that commission money set aside for brokers had been diverted to cover other losses. An embezzlement claim the firm has denied. He took the fight outside the building.
In 2020 and 2021 he went to the FBI and alleged Lutnick had undeclared ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Documents later released in the Epstein files recorded his further claim that Lutnick “made his money through Ponzi schemes and money laundering.”
What he then pulled from the Justice Department’s own dump was harder to wave away. A 2018 email chain in which Lutnick and Epstein discussed Adfin, a start up both men were invested in, undercutting Lutnick’s line that contact ended in 2005 and that there was no business relationship. Andriesz also said the files showed Lutnick, in his words, trying to “buy a prince” . A 2013 proposal to put £1 million toward Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in exchange for introductions to money and sovereign contacts. BGC says that joint venture never happened. Cantor Fitzgerald has denied business dealings with the former prince. Lutnick has since confirmed he visited Epstein’s island in 2012 with his wife and children, years after Epstein’s conviction, and has described his meetings with the financier as inconsequential.
Andriesz did not stop at one agency. He sent the material to the FCA, the FBI, and the House Oversight Committee. Weeks before he died he was still saying the personal cost of blowing the whistle, and the retaliation he claimed followed, had been devastating for him and his family.
On the 23rd of September 2026 the 57 year old was found dead in Thailand. His family says he took his own life and that there is no suggestion of foul play. The timing has not quieted the questions. British MPs are now demanding an inquiry into how the City regulator treated him after he said the retaliation was escalating and he had been left without protection. The commerce secretary’s office and the firm have not accepted the core accusations. What remains on the record is a former lieutenant who spent years saying the public story of Howard Lutnick and Jeffrey Epstein did not match the emails, the island trip, or the proposed royal introduction and who is no longer alive to press the point.
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