Britain’s financial regulator is reviewing its treatment of a whistleblower who took his own life after revealing alleged wrongdoing at a Wall Street brokerage formerly run by US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.
Simon Andriesz’s death by suicide last month has triggered controversy over whether the Financial Conduct Authority was supportive enough of the 57-year-old and whether it took his allegations of retaliation by his former employer sufficiently seriously.
A cross-party group of MPs has warned Andriesz’s death raised “deeply troubling questions” and called for an external inquiry into the FCA’s handling of whistleblowers. The politicians said the regulators should not be “marking their own homework” on this issue.
The FCA told the FT in a statement it had asked Lea Paterson, a former Bank of England official who recently joined the regulator’s board as a non-executive, to lead a review examining “how we interacted with Mr Andriesz to learn any lessons for the future”.
“We are very sorry to hear of Mr Andriesz’s death. Our thoughts are with his family and friends,” said the regulator, which is aiming to publish the conclusions of its internal review by the end of the year.
The events are likely to intensify concern that anyone blowing the whistle in the UK often pays a high price with little reward. Many suffer financial and emotional harm, often losing their job and being blacklisted by potential employers while enduring the stress of hiring lawyers and taking on corporate giants with deep pockets.
The all-party parliamentary group on investment fraud and fairer financial services said Andriesz’s death “raised deeply troubling questions about the way whistleblowers can be treated when they approach the FCA with concerns about wrongdoing and subsequent retaliation”.
Andriesz blew the whistle to several US and UK regulators about alleged wrongdoing at BGC Group, a listed broker controlled by Cantor Fitzgerald where he was a managing director.
Lutnick ran both companies until becoming US commerce secretary last year, when he transferred his ownership in Cantor Fitzgerald to trusts benefiting his children and sold his stake in BGC.
Andriesz also passed emails showing Lutnick’s links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to the House Oversight Committee, which subsequently questioned the commerce secretary about them behind closed doors.
However, while other regulators imposed penalties on BGC as a result of information Andriesz provided, he told a recent event that the FCA did not investigate most of his allegations and only took supervisory action that was “basically a slap on the wrist”.
The parliamentary group said in a statement that the UK regulator “acknowledged that advice given to Simon by an FCA official — that he had lost whistleblower protection because his identity had become known — was incorrect. The FCA apologised and said that further guidance and training would be provided to its whistleblowing team.”
Information provided by Andriesz helped several US and UK authorities to take action against BGC. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered BGC to pay $3mn and to comply with various undertakings in 2019 to settle charges of “numerous supervision, reporting and record-keeping violations”.
In 2020, the US Securities and Exchange Commission imposed a $1.4mn civil penalty on BGC in a settlement of alleged “false and misleading disclosures”.
In the UK, HM Revenue & Customs issued BGC with determinations in 2024 to pay £96mn of tax on money paid to members of its limited-liability partnership.
Andriesz was paid $420,000 under the CFTC whistleblower programme, which rewards people who voluntarily provide information that leads to enforcement action. But he said in the recent event for the Transparency Taskforce that this payout was more than absorbed by legal costs and more than £200,000 of medical bills incurred due to the strain of the whistleblowing process.
The UK financial regulator is expected to be quizzed about Andriesz at its annual meeting in Edinburgh on Tuesday.
BGC said it was “sorry to hear this sad news and expresses our condolences to Mr Andriesz’s family during this difficult time.” The US commerce department did not respond to a request for comment.