INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
The FCA fined a bank chief executive 642,430 for trying to unmask a whistleblower. Then an FCA official told Simon Andriesz that losing his anonymity had cost him his protection. The regulator now accepts that was wrong.
Simon Andriesz typed three letters into a search box. HWL. He had spent years as a managing director at BGC Partners and he knew that senior people there signed internal emails with their initials, so when the United States Justice Department released millions of pages from the Epstein files, he knew exactly what to look for. He found a 2018 exchange between Howard Lutnick and Epstein discussing the prospects of a start-up in which both had an interest. Lutnick is now the United States Commerce Secretary. He ran BGC and Cantor Fitzgerald for decades. Andriesz took what he had found to the House Oversight Committee, and in July he told the BBC’s File on 4 Investigates about it.
He died in Thailand on 23 September, aged 57. His family said he had taken his own life and that there was no suggestion of foul play.
Nobody has to have silenced Simon Andriesz for his death to be an indictment. He spent nine years telling the right authorities, in writing, through the proper channels, and the British system he told kept answering that it had looked carefully and found insufficient evidence.
Andriesz had been a whistleblower long before Epstein’s name entered his story. By the BBC’s account he...
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