British billionaire Joe Lewis, owner of the Tottenham Hotspur soccer club and majority owner of Australia’s biggest premium beef producer AACo, has been charged with insider trading in the US.
Federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment in New York that the 86-year-old passed on inside information from companies in which he was a large investor to friends, including his personal pilots, assistants, and romantic partners. Lewis, the founder of investment firm Tavistock Group, faces more than a dozen charges, including securities fraud.
“None of this was necessary, Joe Lewis was a wealthy man,” Damian Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement on Tuesday. “But as we allege he used inside information as a way to compensate his employees or shower gifts on his friends and lovers.”
Prosecutors didn’t announce Lewis’ arrest with the indictment.
“The government has made an egregious error in judgment in charging Mr Lewis, an 86-year-old man of impeccable integrity and prodigious accomplishment,” Lewis’s lawyer David M. Zornow said in a statement. “Mr Lewis has come to the US voluntarily to answer these ill-conceived charges, and we will defend him vigorously in court.”
Lewis has a 51 per cent stake in AACo through his own investment vehicle Tavistock. The $1 billion-plus company is the nation’s largest cattle herd operator and owns about 6.4 million hectares, equivalent to 1 per cent, of Australia’s landmass.
Prosecutors claim Lewis was engaged in insider trading for eight years, passing on material non-public information about several companies, including Solid Biosciences, Australian Agricultural Co and Mirati Therapeutics. In one instance, Lewis allegedly loaned his pilots $US500,000 ($741,000) each so they could buy shares before a company’s clinical trial news became public.
A call and email to Tavistock’s media team after hours weren’t immediately returned. Tottenham didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.