Andrew Josef Feinstein ( ; born 16 March 1964) is a South African former politician, economic advisor and investment banker, now activist, political consultant, filmmaker, campaigner and author, who specialises in the investigation of the arms trade and the corruption that accompanies it. He is the executive director of the small non-profit Shadow World Investigations, and serves on the board of Declassified UK.
Feinstein was elected in South Africa's first democratic elections following the abolition of apartheid and served as a member of parliament from 1994 to 2001 as a member of the ruling ANC party. He resigned his parliamentary seat in 2001, in protest against the ANC government's handling of the South African Arms Deal and exclusion of the Special Investigating Unit from the resulting anti-corruption probe. He then worked as an investment banker, and later became an investigative author and campaigner.
A former member of the UK Labour Party, Feinstein stood against Labour leader Keir Starmer in the 2024 general election in his constituency Holborn and St Pancras, and finished second to Starmer.
Biography Early life and education Andrew Feinstein was born in Cape Town to Viennese Holocaust survivor Erika () and Ralph Josef Feinstein, who emigrated to South Africa from London after World War II and whose views have been described as "liberal Zionist". Thirty-nine members of his mother's family were murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz concentration camp and Theresienstadt, whilst she survived hidden in a Vienna coal cellar that Feinstein later visited as a boy. She was active in the Black Sash human rights organisation for liberal white women, while his father was a member of the left-wing anti-racist South African Congress of Democrats during the 1950s. She worked at a theatre employing racially-mixed staff in defiance of the apartheid laws and Feinstein met the young pianist Dollar Brand through her. Her wartime experiences and her work with anti-apartheid groups inspired Feinstein to become involved in the then-outlawed African National Congress (ANC) as a teenager in the 1980s.
Feinstein completed his secondary education at Wynberg Boys' High School in Cape Town in 1981; four years later he graduated with a BA (Honours) degree from the University of Cape Town. As a student, he took part in political activities in the townships outside Cape Town. He left South Africa to avoid conscription into the South African Defence Force and deployment in the South African Border War, and studied graduate-level economics and politics from 1985 to 1987 at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1990, he gained a Master of Philosophy degree in economics and politics from the University of Cambridge.
Political career in South Africa Feinstein returned to South Africa in 1991 and joined the African National Congress, now operating as a legal party. A back room politician, he came to be known as the ANC's "Mr Clean". He took part as a facilitator in the negotiations to end apartheid, starting from the first plenary meeting of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park in December 1991.
Feinstein was elected an ANC regional member of parliament under Nelson Mandela in the first democratic election in 1994. He served as a member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature, where he chaired the Finance and Economics Committee and assisted in the establishment of the Gauteng provincial treasury and an economic affairs department. He was an advisor to member of the Executive Council of Gauteng (MEC) for finance and economic affairs, Jabu Moleketi, from 1994 to 1996. He also worked as an economic advisor to the premier of Gauteng, Tokyo Sexwale. He replaced Marcel Golding as a member of the South African Parliament's lower house in 1997. He served in Johannesburg South until the 1999 election, and then in the former Sea Point constituency in Cape Town and on the Atlantic seaboard of the Cape Province.
Feinstein introduced the first ever motion on the Holocaust in South African parliamentary history. He stated that previous suffering – by Afrikaners at the hands of the British colonizers, or of Jews by the Nazis – in no way justified the brutal oppression of Black South Africans or Palestinians.
During his time as national MP, Feinstein served on the National Assembly of South Africa's Trade & Industry Committee and Finance Committee, playing a leading role in the ANC's finance portfolio committee. He was the ANC's official spokesman and ranking member, or head of the ANC study group, on the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) and became the committee's deputy chair. He also chaired the sub-committee that drafted the Public Finance Management Act (Act 1 of 2000) and was appointed deputy chairman of the Audit Commission. According to a 2020 interviewer, he had gained a reputation as "one of [the ANC's] most vocal and talented MPs"; a source in 2001 called him "the ANC's most outspoken and vocal member on the [SCOPA]".
South African Arms Deal
In 1999, Patricia de Lille, the chief whip of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, presented her dossier of corruption allegations against the ANC's leading politicians in the South African Arms Deal and demanded an independent inquiry led by Judge Willem Heath's anti-corruption Special Investigating Unit (SIU), receiving support from white South Africans. In September 2000, the auditor-general Shauket Fakie reported irregularities in the arms deal's primary contracts to the SCOPA and recommended a special investigation of the awards made to subcontractors. In October 2000, the SCOPA published its controversial 14th report recommending a multi-agency probe into the deal. Feinstein joined the SCOPA chair Gavin Woods and opposition parties in calling for the SIU to be one of the four bodies to conduct the investigation, but his ANC colleagues on the study group disputed that a November resolution by the SCOPA had recommended appointing the SIU. Feinstein was reprimanded by the ANC's National Executive Committee for questioning the government's "integrity" in the SCOPA meetings. He led hearings concerning the arms deal at the SCOPA and later claimed to have witnessed lobbying efforts by BAE Systems, backed by visits of the British prime minister Tony Blair, as part of the deal.
As a result of President Mbeki and the ANC's parliamentary caucus opposing the involvement of the SIU in the probe, and of his conflict with fellow ANC public accounts committee members, on 29 January 2001 Feinstein was replaced as head of the ANC study group on public accounts and the ANC's ranking member on the SCOPA by the party's deputy whip Geoff Doidge; the decision was taken at a meeting of ANC MPs chaired by the party chief whip Tony Yengeni, who had been named in the de Lille dossier. Feinstein vowed to stay on the SCOPA and push for an independent investigation, saying that at stake were issues "far bigger than [his] own position", such as "the accountability of the executive to the legislature". However, after being limited by his colleagues in the ANC study group to speaking in the committee with their prior approval, he refused to attend the meetings and vote in them, for which he was reported to chief whip Yengeni. In June 2001, he abstained on the ANC's controversial motion of confidence in the National Assembly speaker Frene Ginwala and came to face disciplinary action that could have included expulsion from the party.
On 30 August 2001, Feinstein resigned from the National Assembly in protest against the government's handling of the arms deal and the investigation, citing the affair's alleged impact on "national reconciliation", "sound economic management" and "delivery on key social needs". He accused the government and the ANC of interfering with the parliamentary process, but blamed the breakdown of the SCOPA as a non-partisan body on both government and opposition parties and declared his intention to remain a member of the ANC. He welcomed the arrest of Tony Yengeni in October 2001, but by 2007 criticised the joint investigation report on the arms deal submitted by the three agencies to the parliament in November 2001 as "weak and incomplete". In November 2001, he accepted to meet with minister of finance Trevor Manuel, who was rumoured to have opposed the arms deal due to concerns over "fiscal stability"; he alleged in 2007 that Manuel told him to "let [the affair] lie", which Manuel denied in 2014.
Post-parliamentary career in the United Kingdom Following his resignation, Feinstein received offers of employment from the private sector. He moved to London and in January 2002 took up a senior managerial position in the organisation development unit of the Anglo-South African banking group Investec, where he worked until 2007.
Feinstein chaired the London-based charity Friends of the Treatment Action Campaign, the UK arm of the South African AIDS activist organisation patronised by Desmond Tutu, Gillian Slovo and Glenys Kinnock that started out campaigning against the alleged AIDS denialism of President Mbeki. FOTAC was launched in October 2005 and wound down in February 2016. Feinstein's deputy was Oliver Phillips of the Britain–Zimbabwe Society.
Feinstein's 2007 memoir After the Party criticised the political culture of the ANC and was reported to "present the ANC itself as the problem", with President Thabo Mbeki as "chief villain" and Jacob Zuma escaping direct condemnation. Feinstein argued in the book that the ill-fated arms deal was the "point at which the ANC lost its moral compass". He traveled to Cape Town to launch the book in 2007. Although he remained a member of the ANC as of 2007, he was now labelled the party's "opponent". The ANC's response to the book alleged that Feinstein had "concocted shameless fabrications to invent corrupt practices around the so-called arms deal", but the party ignored Feinstein's challenge for it to sue him and only sought to discourage the use of his book by South African journalists. Following a complaint by Trevor Manuel, Feinstein removed the claim that Manuel had recommended denying therapy to HIV-positive South Africans at a secret parliamentary meeting from the book.
After the Party achieved commercial success in South Africa and Feinstein left Investec to focus on writing and campaigning. By the end of 2007, he had started his own consultancy. An international edition of the book was published in 2009.
In January 2010, Feinstein launched the non-governmental organization Corruption Watch UK (renamed to Shadow World Investigations in 2021) jointly with Susan Hawley, the founder and later executive director of Spotlight on Corruption. As of 2025, he is the executive director of the organisation.
From January 2010 to July 2011, Feinstein was an Open Society International Fellow while writing his second book, The Shadow World (2011). He also held a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy and participated in the Distinguished Visitors Programme at the London School of Economics.
By 2021, Feinstein became an associate in Greg Power's London-based political consultancy non-profit Global Partners Governance (described in 2014 as "a privileged contractor to the Foreign Office for consulting missions in the Middle East"), after featuring in the organisation's podcast in 2017.
In early 2025, Feinstein joined the board of Declassified UK, an investigative journalism website set up in 2019 by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis to cover the UK's role on the international stage.
Feinstein has filed parliamentary submissions of evidence in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and multiple European, Middle Eastern and African countries.
Political involvement in the United Kingdom Labour Party