A British man has told the BBC how he unearthed evidence indicating that his former employer, Howard Lutnick - now US commerce secretary - failed to disclose a business relationship with the paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein.
Simon Andriesz, previously a managing director at a Wall Street firm, 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.
Andriesz shared his findings - from the millions of released Epstein files - with US politicians on the influential House Oversight Committee, ahead of an appearance there by Lutnick in May.
Lutnick told the committee that, to the best of his knowledge, he had only learned this year that Epstein had been an investor in the firm. Speaking on his behalf, the US Commerce Department told us there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
Andriesz also discovered in the files that one of Lutnick's firms had made plans in 2013 to go into business with another figure linked to Epstein, the then-Prince Andrew, by commercially exploiting the contacts the former UK trade envoy had made.
"What it involved was a loan to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of £1m... to basically buy a prince," he tells File on 4 Investigates.
"I was completely shocked," says Andriesz, describing the moment when he discovered his own name in the Epstein files - a massive collection of documents, photos, video and emails relating to the notorious sex offender, released by the US government in the past year.
The specific files in which Andriesz appeared related to interviews he had given to the FBI while in dispute with his former employer, BGC Partners - a financial brokerage firm, part of Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald group.
In 2016, Andriesz had raised concerns internally about accounting irregularities at the firm. He was sacked in 2017, but some of his allegations later led to BGC being ordered to pay a $3m (£2.24m) penalty by the US derivatives regulator for "numerous supervision, reporting, and record-keeping violations".
BGC told us that Andriesz's allegations lacked credibility and were "categorically false". It said the claims had been investigated by authorities in several jurisdictions which, according to BGC, had not substantiated the allegations.
Andriesz spoke to the FBI about BGC, and about the firm's ultimate boss, Lutnick, in 2020-21 - after Epstein had killed himself in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The Epstein files show Andriesz alleged that Lutnick had had undeclared business ties with Epstein. The FBI did not investigate these accusations.
Andriesz tells the BBC he was disappointed that few had seemed interested in what he had discovered: "I'm exposing Howard Lutnick's relationship, financial links, with Jeffrey Epstein, and there's no interest."
In 2025, Lutnick was appointed US commerce secretary, at which point he sold his shares in Cantor Fitzgerald and passed control of the firm to his sons.
On a podcast later that year, he claimed he had only ever met Epstein once, 20 years earlier, when they had been neighbours in Manhattan, and that he had found his behaviour "gross".
