Simon Andriesz, Whistleblower Who Exposed Howard Lutnick’s Epstein Ties, Dies at 57
Simon Andriesz, the British financial whistleblower whose search through the Epstein files produced new evidence about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, has died at 57.
Andy Agathangelou, founder of the Transparency Task Force, confirmed that Andriesz died last week, and The Banker reported on October 2 that he died by suicide.
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Artur Nadolny, a writer who corresponded with Andriesz and profiled him in August, said he took his own life while staying at a trauma treatment centre, where he had gone to recover from years of legal and professional strain.
No public evidence or official finding has indicated foul play, and details about a funeral or surviving family have not been released. Posts across social media have labelled the death suspicious, but none has offered evidence to support the claim.
Andriesz spent more than three decades in the securities industry and was a managing director at BGC Partners, part of the Cantor Fitzgerald group that Lutnick led. After a dispute with the firm, he reported alleged malpractice to the FBI and spoke to agents about BGC and Lutnick in 2020 and 2021.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined BGC $3 million in 2019 for supervision, reporting and recordkeeping violations after he filed whistleblower reports, and he later received an award from a US regulator.
He said the retaliation that followed cost him his career, his finances and his health. BGC has denied retaliating against him and called his allegations “categorically false”.
His name reached a global audience on July 14, when the BBC broadcast an investigation by Andy Verity for File on 4. Andriesz told the programme that most people combing through the Department of Justice’s Epstein files were searching for “Lutnick” and finding little, so he searched for Lutnick’s initials, “HWL”, instead.
The search returned a 2018 email exchange in which Epstein asked HWL what he thought the prospects were for Adfin, a digital advertising start-up in which both men’s interests had invested.
Lutnick replied that the company was finally producing revenue and that it was “their year”. Other documents placed Lutnick on Epstein’s private island in 2012, and Andriesz also described a 2013 plan involving a loan of about £1 million (roughly $1.3 million) to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, tied to the contacts he made as a trade envoy.
The material cut against Lutnick’s public account. He told the House Oversight Committee in May that, to the best of his recollection, he did not learn until this year that Epstein was a co-investor in Adfin. A spokesperson for the Department of Commerce has said Lutnick met Epstein in 2005 and had very limited interactions with him over the next 14 years.
The White House dismissed the BBC report as a “pathetic and desperate attempt to slander” the secretary. Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat and the ranking Democrat on the committee, have both called for Lutnick to resign or be removed.
On July 21, Andriesz spoke publicly for the first time at an online event hosted by the Transparency Task Force, arguing that the Financial Conduct Authority failed to protect him from employer retaliation and that Britain offers whistleblowers far weaker protection than the United States does. His own account described heart illness, financial pressure, litigation and trauma treatment, experiences that cannot by themselves establish why he died.
The death has also been folded into online talk about the Tate brothers. Some posts have noted that Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate, who have commented publicly on Epstein, are “still alive”, and the phrasing has been read as a suggestion of danger to them.
The brothers have no documented connection to Andriesz or his case. Both face criminal charges in Britain and Romania, including allegations of rape and human trafficking, and both deny wrongdoing.
Epstein himself died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and the death was ruled a suicide. Since then, the deaths of people linked to him have drawn intense scrutiny, among them Virginia Giuffre, one of his most prominent accusers, who died in April 2025 in an apparent suicide.
Daniel Siad, a 69-year-old French model scout named thousands of times in the Epstein files and under investigation by French prosecutors, was found dead on July 20 at his home in Colombes, northwest of Paris, with the cause still awaiting an autopsy report. Each case has its own circumstances, and investigators have not linked them to one another.
Anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts can contact the Samaritans in the United Kingdom at 116 123 or call or text 988 in the United States.
