Maddy Swinglehurst

Everyone searched the Epstein files for "Lutnick". Simon Andriesz searched for "HWL". He knew Cantor Fitzgerald executives signed their emails with initials, because he'd been a managing director at Lutnick's brokerage, BGC Partners, across London, New York and Chicago until the firm sacked him on 31 January 2017. He'd spent 2016 raising accounting complaints inside the company and had a heart attack along the way. Some of what he flagged stuck. In November 2019 the CFTC fined BGC Financial $3 million for losing nearly four months of voice recordings on thousands of block trades and for not telling the regulator about an SEC investigation for more than four years. That action earned him a $420,000 whistleblower award. On 19 October 2020 he phoned the FBI and asked to be connected to the Epstein case. He told them his old boss had undeclared ties to Epstein. The FBI never opened a case. His call surfaced anyway, as document EFTA00020515, when the Justice Department released more than 3 million pages this January, so he went looking for the rest. The HWL search turned up a 28 May 2018 exchange. Epstein asks: "what do you think the prospects for adfin are?" Lutnick answers: "Producing revenue finally. This is their year." AdFin was an ad-tech start-up both men had signed investment contracts for in December 2012; Epstein put in $875,000. Andriesz handed the chain to House Oversight Democrats before Lutnick's closed-door interview on 6 May, where Lutnick said he'd only learned this year that Epstein was a co-investor. He also found Cantor's 2013 plan to lend £1 million to a company controlled by Prince Andrew in exchange for exclusive introductions. His phrase for it on the BBC's File on 4 in July: "to basically buy a prince." In written reasons dated 11 August, an employment judge struck out his UK claim against BGC, Lutnick and BGC co-CEO Jean-Pierre Aubin as nearly nine years out of time. BGC calls his allegations "categorically false". The White House called the BBC report "pathetic and desperate". A friend who'd profiled him in August posted on 25 September that he'd taken his own life at a trauma treatment centre. He was 57. BGC's application for its costs against him is listed for 24 November.