Call him the $78 million man.
A Florida financial investigator is getting a cool $30 million from a federal commodities regulator for blowing the whistle on a conflict of interest at JPMorgan Chase.
Edward Siedle’s reward is the largest ever awarded by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — and, in fact, is triple its previous largest award, the CFTC said Thursday.
Siedle, a former lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission turned forensic investigator, also alerted the SEC to the bank’s wrongdoing.
The SEC has preliminarily approved a $48 million payout to Siedle — meaning the intrepid investigator is in line for a total of $78 million in whistleblower payouts.
Siedle, who has taken on pension funds for overcharging beneficiaries, alerted regulators of a mutual fund scam being run by JPMorgan Chase in 2011, The Post has learned.
The 2011 law, which created whistleblower awards of 10 percent to 30 percent of whatever the regulator collects as a result of an enforcement action, bars the agencies from divulging the name of the informer who approaches them.
In this case, Siedle outed himself. He told The Post he was the whistleblower who successfully brought evidence of conflicts of interest to the CFTC.
“I’m the one who blew the whistle,” Siedle said. “I filed the original whistleblower complaint in 2011 and worked with the CFTC on it for several years.”
The larger part of the award comes from a $267 million settlement between JPMorgan and the SEC, which investigated the bank for steering high-net-worth clients toward its own investment funds that could cost more than those managed by rivals.
The CFTC joined the investigation because some of the JPM investment products involved commodities. The bank agreed to pay $100 million to settle the CFTC probe.
Together, the two awards may be the largest-ever payday for a single whistleblower, sources said. News of the CFTC award comes just weeks after regulators moved to limit the size of such awards.
The power for the government to issue rewards was established as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and has been a thorn in Wall Street banks’ side for encouraging workers to speak up about wrongdoing.
Siedle said he has filed about two whistleblower suits a year since the program started, and has no immediate plans for the award.
“I’m not going to do anything, man,” he said. “I’ve had a few big paydays in my past. There’s not going to be any conspicuous consumption going on.”
He does plan on using the money to keep pressure on Wall Street’s bad actors, though.
“Winning these big awards allows me to do more forensic investigations,” he added.