Joe Lewis, the billionaire owner of Tottenham Hotspur football club, has been fined $5m (£4m) for insider trading, but will avoid going to prison. Lewis pleaded guilty to the charge in January, part of a deal with prosecutors in which he admitted passing confidential information about his companies to friends, personal assistants, romantic partners and pilots. Thursday’s Manhattan court hearing saw him ordered to serve three years of probation. One of Lewis’s companies, Broad Bay Ltd, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and was fined $44m.
The pilot who received the insider information from Lewis texted a friend when the tycoon gave him a $500k loan, along with stock advice to buy shares in a pharmaceutical company. The company soon announced a successful result in respect of a new cancer drug and the stock price rose over 16%. The pilot cashed in and repaid Lewis. Altogether, the fraud netted millions of dollars.
Prosecutors alleged that Lewis didn’t share the insider information to bolster his estimated worth of $6.2bn, but rather to benefit his employees and associates. The accusations against him included tipping off a girlfriend with information about a confidential trial of a technology company, ultimately resulting in a doubling of her investment. Lewis, who is 87, came to court wearing an eye patch.
Lewis was born in London and began with a restaurant business that his father had founded. After selling that, he moved into currency speculation and investments and was among those investors who bet heavily against the pound ahead of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. He is founder of Tavistock Group, which holds ownership stakes in a range of properties, energy and life science firms, finance and sporting enterprises, including Tottenham Hotspur
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