British whistleblower exposes US commerce secretary's hidden Epstein ties
Image: BBC News
A British whistleblower says he has uncovered evidence that the man now running America's commerce department — Howard Lutnick — failed to disclose a business relationship with the convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Simon Andriesz, a former managing director at a Wall Street firm, told the BBC he found an email chain from 2018 in which Lutnick and Epstein discussed a shared start-up venture. He passed his findings to the influential House Oversight Committee ahead of Lutnick's appearance there in May.
Lutnick, who is now US commerce secretary, told the committee he had only learned this year that Epstein had been an investor in the firm. The Commerce Department said there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
But Andriesz, now living in Cornwall, also discovered that one of Lutnick's firms had drawn up plans in 2013 to go into business with another Epstein-linked figure — Britain's then-Prince Andrew — by commercially exploiting his royal contacts. “What it involved was a loan to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of £1m… to basically buy a prince,” he told the BBC's File on 4 Investigates.
“I was completely shocked,” Andriesz says, describing the moment he found his own name inside the vast Epstein files — a trove of documents, photos, video and emails released by the US government over the past year.
Why it matters: The revelations land at a combustible moment in Washington, where Epstein's name remains a political lightning rod and scrutiny of powerful figures linked to him shows no sign of fading. Any suggestion that a sitting cabinet secretary misled Congress would be explosive.
BGC, the brokerage firm at the centre of the dispute, rejected Andriesz's claims as lacking credibility and “categorically false,” noting regulators in several jurisdictions had not substantiated them. Andriesz was sacked in 2017 after raising internal concerns about accounting irregularities; some of those allegations later led to a $3m penalty against BGC.
What's next: With the files still being released and congressional oversight intensifying, Lutnick's denials are likely to face further testing — and the story of who knew what about Epstein is far from finished.