Joe Lewis: Tottenham Hotspur owner due in NY court on insider trading charges

- By Brandon Drenon in Washington DC & Antoinette Radford in London
- BBC News
Image supply, Getty Images
UK billionaire Joe Lewis, whose household belief owns Tottenham Hotspur soccer membership, will seem in a US court to face insider trading charges.
Earlier, New York prosecutors charged him with hatching a “brazen” scheme that enriched his mates.
Confidential data he provided allowed them to revenue from shopping for or promoting associated shares, the 29-page indictment alleges.
His lawyer David Zornow stated charging him was an “egregious error”.
He added that the charges could be “defended vigorously in court”, and that the 86-year-old had come to the US voluntarily to defend himself in opposition to the “ill-conceived charges”.
He often resides in the Bahamas.
In an announcement, a Tottenham Hotspur spokesperson stated the charges going through Mr Lewis had no bearing on the membership: “This is a legal matter unconnected with the club and as such we have no comment.”
It’s been famous that final October the membership made a submitting to Companies House confirming that Lewis was – the membership stated – “no longer a person with significant control at the club”.
Mr Lewis was charged with 16 counts of safety fraud, and three counts of conspiracy for crimes alleged to have taken place between 2013 to 2021.
“We allege that, for years, Joe Lewis abused his access to corporate board rooms and repeatedly provided inside information to his romantic partners, his personal assistants, his private pilots, and his friends,” US legal professional Damian Williams stated in the video.
Mr Williams, the chief federal regulation enforcement officer for the SDNY, alleged that Mr Lewis’s acquaintances used that data to make tens of millions of {dollars} in the inventory market.
“Thanks to [Mr] Lewis, those bets were a sure thing,” he claimed. “None of this was necessary. Joe Lewis is a wealthy man”, he added.
The indictment quoted one pilot texting a buddy that “Boss lent Marty and I $500,000 each for this,” and that he thought “the Boss has inside info” as a result of “otherwise why would he make us invest”.
It listed a number of events on which Mr Lewis allegedly instructed his pilots to promote or make investments in shares on the inventory change, after he obtained confidential data.
The indictment additionally alleges that Mr Lewis instructed a girlfriend to take a position in a biotech firm in July 2019, earlier than the outcomes of its medical trial had been made public.
After talking to his girlfriend, he allegedly logged into her checking account himself and used virtually all of her obtainable funds to take a position into the corporate – amounting to US$700,000 (£542ok). She then offered the shares for $849,000 (£658ok), say prosecutors.
The indictment listed many different alleged incidents of Mr Lewis telling mates, girlfriends and workers to take a position in shares primarily based on insider data.
Insider trading is the unlawful follow of utilizing confidential data to commerce on the inventory change to at least one’s benefit.
Mr Lewis is reported to be certainly one of Britain’s richest males. According to the indictment he has a 98-metre superyacht that at instances is his main residence.
He additionally owns a stake in UK pub chain Mitchells & Butlers. He was ranked 39th in the 2023 Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated value of greater than £5bn.