The man who alerted Congress to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s ties to child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein has died.
Simon Andriesz, a British former Wall Street banker who once worked under Lutnick, died by suicide at 57, The Banker reports.
Andriesz, who was living in Cornwall, England, as of July, exposed the extent of Lutnick’s relationship with Epstein earlier this year when he shared a 2018 email chain with House Oversight Committee lawmakers in which Lutnick and Epstein discussed Adfin, a digital advertising company they had both invested in.
Andriesz had found the email chain by searching the Justice Department’s release of millions of Epstein files for “HWL,” Lutnick’s initials, knowing from his years at BGC Partners, a financial brokerage firm where Lutnick was CEO, that executives preferred to use initials in emails, he told the BBC in July.
The email chain and other material in the Epstein files contradicted Lutnick’s assertions about his relationship with Epstein. The commerce secretary told a New York Post podcast last year that he first met Epstein in 2005 after he and his wife moved next door to him, but said he soon cut off contact after being creeped out by Epstein’s massage room during a tour of his Manhattan townhome.
But the email chain shows Lutnick and Epstein remained in friendly contact until at least 2018, a decade after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, and a year before he died in jail while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
Lutnick told the Senate Appropriations Committee in February that he and his family even traveled to Epstein’s notorious island in 2012, saying, “I don’t recall why we did it.”
During a May hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Lutnick claimed that he had only learned that Epstein was an investor in Adfin when the Epstein files were released this year.
Andriesz, who was fired from BGC after raising concerns internally about accounting irregularities, had blown the whistle on Lutnick’s ties to Epstein years before alerting Congress to their correspondence.
While speaking to the FBI in 2020 and 2021 during an investigation into some of his allegations about the firm, where Lutnick was CEO until last year, he alleged that Lutnick had undeclared business ties to Epstein, according to the BBC. The FBI did not investigate the accusations.
Andriesz’s death was confirmed to The Banker by Andy Agathangelou, who founded the Transparency Task BGForce, a group advocating for greater transparency in finance that had previously hosted Andriesz at whistleblowing events.
“It is with great sadness that we share the news that Simon Andriesz, a valued member of our community, passed away last week,” Agathangelou told the outlet.
The Commerce Department and the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
