Federal prosecutors charged Joseph C. Lewis, the British billionaire who owns the Tottenham Hotspur English soccer membership, with insider buying and selling on Tuesday, accusing him of illegally funneling nonpublic data to associates to commerce on.
In a 29-page indictment, prosecutors in Manhattan accused the 86-year-old financier of doling out tricks to mates and associates, together with his pilots, private assistants and romantic companions from 2019 to 2021.
“He used inside information as a way to compensate employees and shower gifts on friends and lovers,” Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, stated in a press release. “It’s cheating and against the law.”
Prosecutors additionally accused Mr. Lewis of conspiring to cover a roughly 20 p.c stake in Mirati Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical firm, via a sequence of shell firms and false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A lawyer for Mr. Lewis, David Zornow, stated that prosecutors had “made an egregious error in judgment in charging Mr. Lewis, an 86-year-old man of impeccable integrity and prodigious accomplishment.” Mr. Zornow added that his consumer had gone to the United States voluntarily to reply to the fees and deliberate to struggle them in courtroom.
From his residence bases within the Bahamas, Florida and Argentina, Mr. Lewis owns the Tavistock Group, an enormous internet of companies throughout 13 nations, together with the Mitchells & Butlers chain of pubs, nation golf equipment and motels. Among Tavistock’s crown jewels is a majority stake in Tottenham, the English Premier League soccer membership in north London that Mr. Lewis took management of in 2007.
On Wednesday, Tottenham stated, “This a legal matter unconnected with the club and as such we have no comment.”
Mr. Lewis amassed a fortune from many years of foreign money buying and selling, speculating on actions of the British pound — teaming up with George Soros in 1992 to mint enormous earnings — and the Mexican peso. Bloomberg has estimated his web price at greater than $6.5 billion.
Mr. Lewis grew up above a pub in London’s East End and helped rework his father’s catering firm into a sequence of themed eating places. By age 15 he had dropped out of college to focus full-time on business, and after promoting the restaurant business moved to the Bahamas as a technique to keep away from taxes.
For a lot of his profession he has stayed under the radar, seemingly content material to wager on actual property and play golf. But he has sometimes struck high-profile offers. In the Nineties, he purchased a virtually 30 p.c stake in Christie’s, the public sale home, earlier than promoting that funding to François Pinault, a French luxurious mogul.
And in 2007, Mr. Lewis emerged as an investor in Bear Stearns, spending greater than $1 billion to build up a virtually 10 p.c stake within the funding home over a matter of months. The timing of his wager proved horrible, nevertheless. In 2008, because the monetary disaster unfolded, Bear Stearns was pressured to promote itself to JPMorgan Chase for $10 a share. (He had paid as a lot as $110 a share.)
Mr. Lewis can be a high-powered artwork collector, who has owned items by Picasso, Matisse, David Hockney and extra. Among his most outstanding holdings are the unique sculpture and a number of other copies of “Charging Bull,” the enduring bronze ode to capitalism close to Wall Street.
Source: www.nytimes.com