r/politics • • 4h ago

Possible Paywall Whistleblower Who Exposed Trump Goon’s Ties to Epstein Found Dead

https://www.thedailybeast.com/whistleblower-simon-andriesz-who-exposed-howard-lutnicks-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein-found-dead/
12.7k Upvotes

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u/Addicted_to_Nature 4h ago

Someone needs to make an American version of suspicious political deaths like they did for russia

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u/B-Z_B-S Massachusetts 4h ago

(Piggybacking off of this comment because my original comment got buried in the Best by the algorithm for including a link, I think. Or for including words the algorith doesn't like):

(From another article on this, so that people can read the story behind the paywall):

"Former British banker and whistleblower Simon Andriesz, who outed Howard Lutnick’s links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has died by suicide.

Andriesz was previously a managing director at Wall Street firm BGC Group where Lutnick, now the US commerce secretary, was chief executive officer.

The death of the 57-year-old was confirmed by Andy Agathangelou, the founder of campaign group Transparency Task Force, which has previously hosted events related to whistleblowing with Andriesz. Agathangelou said: “It is with great sadness that we share the news that Simon Andriesz, a valued member of our community, passed away last week.”

In February, Lutnick confirmed he had visited Epstein’s island in 2012, contradicting previous statements that he had ended ties with the sex offender years earlier. Speaking before the Senate Appropriations Committee, he said: “I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation. My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies . . . We had lunch on the island. That is true. For an hour.”

Andriesz previously told the BBC how he unearthed evidence indicating that Lutnick failed to disclose a business relationship with Epstein, telling the broadcaster that he had discovered an email chain from 2018 in which Lutnick and Epstein had discussed the prospects of a start-up business they were both involved in. The case was featured in the BBC’s File on 4 Investigates, which was broadcast in July in an episode titled The Epstein Files: Lutnick, the Royals and the British Whistleblower.

Lutnick has previously said on the matter: “I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities. The survivors of his crimes deserve our respect and support.”

Shortly after the episode aired, Andriesz spoke at a Transparency Task Force event about what he said was the UK regulator’s mistreatment of whistleblowers, describing the personal cost of coming forward to his career, his health and his family. Andriesz spent over 35 years working in financial markets."

Source: https://www.thebanker.com/content/02286d53-0338-42ef-996d-5f7712b9f133

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u/lisnter 3h ago

Yeah . . . Suicide. Just like Epstein. Not suspicious at all. Fuck Trump and his cadre of enablers.

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u/00Oo0o0OooO0 2h ago

Everyone is immortal in conspiracy theory land. Every death is automatically suspicious.

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u/ForwardHuckleberry26 1h ago

Yeah, and all those russians threw themselves out the window as well /s

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u/blarch 1h ago

Doesn't it make sense that a guy who has received numerous death threats would choose to do it himself?

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u/SanchoPandas Oregon 1h ago

It’s an interesting question. Does it? I can see it making sense if you really felt that doing so would immediately make your family safer. And especially if the threats are coming from people with violence in their pasts.

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u/m0ngoos3 59m ago

Murdering someone makes them a martyr, ruining their life until they kill themselves makes them an example.

You like the safe fantasy of hitmen and such, because it's more comforting than the reality that the entirety of capitalist society is a weapon that can be turned on anyone at any time.

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u/blarch 41m ago

sry I didn't put the /s tag, but I was thinking that's more likely what happened as well. I'm not one of the crime show addicts. Still more of a martyr than an example, imo.

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u/manFCKrddit 26m ago

Well said 🤝 👏

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u/DontSayTheJWord 1h ago

Yeah, right? America is the clear beacon of opportunity, success, and hope. They routinely exhibit displays of great excellence and authenticity. Everything is possible here. Everyone should want to be here, except no one should come because they're not allowed nor wanted, but everyone who was born here should love it. There's literally no reason not to.

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u/OrthogonalThoughts 12m ago

Suicide is easy cover. Basic logic seems to elude you. A number of people "committing suicide" who are connected or have knowledge of illegal acts from politicians is a trend, not a "people die sometimes" situation. But you don't care about facts and logic, you want to discredit something that's a revealing and important data point so it gets forgotten.

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u/Agamemnon323 1m ago

Every whistleblower suicide is certainly suspicious.

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u/Trivale 1h ago

There goes reddit minimizing mental health and suicide again to peddle conspiracy slop with no evidence. Could someone who exposed powerful people doing bad things have been under so much pressure and harassment that his mental health suffered and he took his own life? Nope, must have been the roving hit squads that make murders look like suicides! Funny how nobody can keep secrets with all these whistleblowers, except for the invisible secret hit squads.

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u/gdghhfdffrf 3h ago

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u/marfacza 3h ago

https://x.com/ArturNadol7566/status/2087629605251531081?

HE MAN WHO EXPOSED LUTNICK

This time I was contacted directly by Simon Andriesz (@SAndriesz), the British whistleblower behind the BBC investigation into US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) and his undisclosed ties to Jeffrey Epstein. He reached out to tell me his story himself.

Here is what he told me, and what the @BBC has already confirmed.

WHO HE IS

Simon Andriesz spent over 35 years in financial markets. He rose to managing director at BGC Partners, a Wall Street firm owned by Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run for decades by Howard Lutnick.

He was responsible for 3 trading centres at once, London, New York and Chicago, and held a senior compliance signatory role, meaning he was one of the people whose job was to sign off that everything was above board.

HOW HE FOUND LUTNICK IN THE EPSTEIN FILES

When millions of pages from the Epstein files were released this year, most people searched for Lutnick by name. Andriesz knew the firm's executives usually wrote initials in emails instead, so he searched for HWL, Howard William Lutnick. That search turned up a 2018 email exchange between Epstein and Lutnick discussing a startup called Adfin, which both men had invested in.

He passed this to the US House Oversight Committee before Lutnick testified in May. Lutnick told Congress he only learned this year that Epstein had invested in the company. 21 Democrats on the committee say that is not true and have called for his resignation.

Worth being clear on the timeline here. Andriesz was already the source behind this back in February, when Mother Jones (@MotherJones), a US investigative news outlet, first reported the Adfin email chain, quoting him only as an unnamed British whistleblower.

BBC piece in July was the one that finally put his name to the story and told his full account, but he was the one who put this in front of journalists and Congress months earlier.

Andriesz also found records showing that in 2013 Cantor Fitzgerald discussed a plan to loan the then Prince Andrew £1M in exchange for exclusive access to his contacts with wealthy individuals and sovereign wealth funds.

He describes it plainly as an attempt to buy a prince. Epstein himself privately warned against the deal. It never went ahead. Cantor Fitzgerald does not deny the talks took place but says no business was ever done.

WHAT HE SAYS WAS HAPPENING BEFORE ANY OF THAT

Long before Epstein entered the picture, Andriesz says he was already blowing the whistle on the firm itself. Here is what he alleges, in his own words to regulators and to the Transparency Task Force meeting I watched him speak at.

He says money was quietly diverted out of the broker commission pool, the shared pot brokers earn from client trading, to cover costs like a sexual harassment settlement and other liabilities the brokers were never told about.

He says the firm ran what looked like a staff partnership scheme that was really a way to avoid paying employer National Insurance on compensation. He reported this in detail to HMRC.

He says HMRC has since confirmed it acted on his information, and a UK tax tribunal case now public shows HMRC issued a determination against a BGC subsidiary for roughly £96M, which the company is disputing.

He says HMRC is also now investigating advanced loans BGC gave former and existing partners that were later written off. By Andriesz's count, citing the BBC's own tally, fines, settlements and unpaid tax across BGC and Cantor Fitzgerald now top $300M.

He describes the workplace culture as a boiler room, extremely high pressure and, in his words, dangerous to people's health. He says he personally knows of colleagues who took their own lives, and that one whistleblower who worked closely with him and gave him key evidence developed cancer and died 9 months after testifying in his case.

He also alleges that the firm's long running charity, set up after it lost almost all its staff on 9/11, has at times been used to soften its public image while regulatory questions were left unanswered.

THE PERSONAL COST

Andriesz had a heart attack at his desk in 2015. He says colleagues nearby did nothing while he was having it. He later developed panic attacks that felt like more heart attacks and has needed inpatient trauma treatment more than once since.

In 2016 he had a second serious cardiac episode, and says that while he was receiving emergency treatment for it, he was asked to join a work video call and warned about the consequences of not complying. He was dismissed weeks after returning to work, newly married and trying to rebuild his life.

He says the firm's retaliation included sending him to two doctors of its own choosing, one of whom had an unrelated lawsuit against them for writing false reports.

His main witness, a former colleague who had given him detailed evidence, was later rehired by the company and gave testimony that contradicted what he had told regulators years earlier.

BGC reported him to the police for harassment. Police investigated and ruled there was no crime. The firm's lawyers then threatened him with criminal prosecution and prison. Earlier this year the strain put him in a trauma crisis centre for 2 months.

THE REGULATORS, SCORECARD

The CFTC fined BGC $3M and gave Andriesz a whistleblower award of $420K, naming him specifically as overseas Claimant 2 for providing unique firsthand information that significantly contributed to the case.

He says the award only covered part of his medical, legal and trauma treatment costs. A FINRA arbitration panel later awarded him $500K in compensation for retaliation. He tried to get that award increased through the courts and failed.

FCA took 7 years to conclude its own review and, at the end of it, issued nothing stronger than a supervision order. Along the way, he says the FCA wrongly told him he was not protected as a whistleblower because he had given up his anonymity, a claim so wrong the regulator had to publicly correct it at its own annual meeting.

After he was publicly identified in the Epstein files, he says he began seeing online comments speculating about people wanting him harmed. He reported this to the FCA as a safety concern. He says nothing came of it.

He is now formally requesting an independent review of how his disclosures were handled, and whether UK whistleblower protection law actually offers people in his position any real protection.

WHERE THIS FITS

I heard much of this firsthand at a recent Transparency Task Force meeting, where Andriesz spoke alongside other financial whistleblowers describing strikingly similar treatment by the FCA. I know people in that circle, including Andy Agathangelou (@TransparencyTF), Gary Smith (@G8GWS) and Steve Middleton (@stevemiddi1), and this case fits a pattern I have been documenting for a long time. I will add the video link from that event in the comments.

BGC and Cantor Fitzgerald deny his allegations and call them categorically false. Lutnick's office has dismissed the whole story as a partisan attack. I am laying out what has been reported and what Simon has told me directly so people can judge for themselves. You can find the original BBC article and the full File on 4 audio in the comments below.

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u/[deleted] 3h ago

[deleted]

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u/alaskanloops Alaska 3h ago

Delete everything after the question mark to hit the real link.

I’m still not going to do it since it’s x.com, but you don’t need the parameters

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u/[deleted] 3h ago

[deleted]

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u/marfacza 3h ago

What about England?

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u/-Saucegurlllll 2h ago

The suicide didn't happen in the US.

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u/boppy28 4h ago

That sounds like a quick way to die..

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u/CrazyFinger4 4h ago

Fall out of a window completely accidentally*

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u/ScurvyTurtle 1h ago

Fell asleep from sleeping pills with a rope around the neck and hands handcuffed behind the back

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u/m0ngoos3 55m ago

Nope, having your life ruined until it drives you to suicide can be a rather slow death.

Which is the point of doing it to people. Capitalist society is a weapon that can be turned on anyone. How many missed paychecks are you from homelessness and ruin? Speak out and you'll find out.

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u/CompetitiveSport1 3h ago

Forget making an American version of the Russian list, we just need the right-wing conspiracy theorists to start making a "Trump body count" list like they did with the "Clinton body count" (this was back when "body count" meant "death toll" not how many people you've had sex with)

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u/yoursandforever 5m ago

Who would win the "sex with" contest?

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u/MrFishAndLoaves 3h ago

His name was Thomas Bowers

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u/MobileArtist1371 I voted 2h ago

The right did with the Clinton's, now they are silent with Trump

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_body_count_conspiracy_theory

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u/AstoriaGlrl 1h ago

This guy was British and lived in England, but yes.

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u/Senior_Torte519 Kentucky 2h ago

Its called every movie/tv show with a shady political or business person from the US, did you think they did that because it was just good cinema?

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u/Advanced-Taste665 0m ago

What did that do for them

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u/FarwellRob 3h ago

And please make it for both parties.

I hate both sides. Strongly. I think this would be good for everyone.

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u/Flashy-Ingenuity-182 3h ago

Sure who do you suspect in the Democratic party of killing people?

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u/FarwellRob 2h ago

It doesn’t matter. A page like this must be non-partisan or neither side will believe it.

And the Clintons had plenty of rumors. You can put in the Kennedy family as well.

And let me reiterate, I think both parties have plenty of BS going on. If you think one side or the other is clean, I’d suggest you are falling hard for the echo chamber.

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u/BetterEveryLeapYear 2h ago

We can start with Obama. Hundreds of civilian casualties over years of bombing and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Has Trump killed more? Obviously. Does that make Obama innocent? No.

Or are we not allowed to mention brown people?

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u/Flashy-Ingenuity-182 2h ago

Haha you almost had something to stand on until you decided to try and play the race card. Fuck off racist prick. 

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u/WackyHumanSlop 1h ago

“Civilian” yeah sure buddy