FORTRESS FOUL?

Edens employee is revealed as fed informer

A high-profile hire at a subsidiary of Wes Edens’ $42 billion asset management firm Fortress Investment Group is raising eyebrows on Wall Street.

Edens, founder of Fortress and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, has been going against Wall Street’s code of silence by employing a known felon-turned-government informer, The Post has learned.

The hiring of Adam Siegel, a former Royal Bank of Scotland executive who now works for Edens’ New Fortress Energy, has some exWall Streeters puzzled.

“If that gets out on Wall Street, I’m not saying they’re done, but hell no am I going to work for somewhere that might have an informant or a mole. Pass. I’m out. No, thank you,” said Turney Duff, a former Galleon Group trader who has consulted for the Showtime hit “Billions.”

“It would be very unusual for a firm to hire somebody that they know — and the key is that they have to know — is actively cooperating,” Michael Kimelman, author of “Confessions of a Wall Street Insider,” added.

Siegel, the former co-head of US securitized bond trading at RBS, pleaded guilty in December 2015 to lying to RBS customers about bond security prices and agreed to cooperate in the feds’ ongoing investigation. His cooperation agreement is still active, said a spokesman for the US Attorney’s office in Connecticut.

The Post called New Fortress Energy, which Edens heads, in the weeks leading up to Siegel’s 2015 plea, to ask about the pending charges. The company told The Post that Siegel, who joined New Fortress Energy from RBS in 2014, was no longer “employed at the company or any of its affiliates.”

But court documents show he has been working for the company the entire time. He even helped it win a lucrative five-year contract to supply natural gas to Puerto Rico’s ravaged energy authority, said a source.

“He left RBS, which is the corporate entity that he worked for where the misconduct occurred, in the middle of 2014,” Siegel’s lawyer, Jonathan Polkes, told a federal judge last year. “And ever since that time — so we’re really going on four years — he has been working with a company called New Fortress Energy.”

Polkes made the comments at a May hearing over Siegel’s request for permis- sion to move to Miami.

“They’re going to be employing 50 people, and happily and blessedly under all these unfortunate circumstances the company has enough faith in Adam — knowing everything that’s going on here — that they’ve asked him to run that office,” Polkes said.

When asked about its 2015 statement to The Post, New Fortress Energy said it gave the comment because Siegel had been working as a consultant — not an employee.

“As a consultant, he has no fiduciary or signatory authority ,” said Fortress Investment Group spokesman Gordon Runte. “We respect the rule of law, and we also believe in second chances and in the right of those who have made mistakes to own up to them, to work and to support their families.”

“I understand that the company probably doesn’t want it getting out, because it makes me very suspicious,” said Duff, author of the “The Buy Side.” “It’s extremely weird.”

Siegel’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment.

RBS settled a securities fraud probe tied to Siegel for $44 million in 2017.