- Tottenham Hotspur owner Joe Lewis has been charged by federal prosecutors with insider trading.
- The British billionaire passed information to his pilots, assistants, and romantic partners, an indictment says.
- In one case cited, Lewis is said to have lent his pilots $500,000 each to buy stock before insider information became public.
British billionaire Joe Lewis has been charged by federal prosecutors with insider trading, with prosecutors saying that he passed information to personal pilots, assistants, romantic partners, and a friend he played poker with.
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York said in its indictment that Lewis tipped off his acquaintances with inside information from publicly-traded companies in which he was a large investor, allowing them to collectively make “millions” by trading securities before the information was disclosed to the public.
Damian Williams, US District Judge for the Southern District of New York, said in a video that Lewis “abuses access to corporate boardrooms” to “compensate his employees or to shower gifts on his friends and lovers.”
“That’s classic corporate corruption,” Williams continued.
Lewis, whose wealth Bloomberg puts at $6.55 billion, owns the Bahamas-based holding company Tavistock Group, which says it has investments in more than 200 companies including country clubs, real-estate developments, and a UK pub chain. Lewis also owns English soccer team Tottenham Hotspur.
“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 told Bloomberg. “Mr. Lewis has come to the US voluntarily to answer these ill-conceived charges, and we will defend him vigorously in court.”
In one instance detailed in the indictment, prosecutors say Lewis got non-public information positive results from a clinical trial by Mirati, an oncology company, via an employee at his hedge fund who sat on Mirati’s board. Lewis, one of Mirati’s biggest shareholders, urged a girlfriend of his, his two private pilots, his executive assistant, a person he was romantically involved with, and a person he occasionally played poker with in Argentina to buy Mirati stock, per the indictment.
According to the indictment, Lewis even gave his pilots $500,000 each in short-term loans so that they could buy stock before the news became public.
The indictment also says that, as one of the largest shareholders in Solid Biosciences, Lewis was given confidential information about an upcoming announcement of favorable clinical results. Under advice from Lewis to buy the company’s stock before the news became public, his girlfriend and two pilots bought shares, per the indictment. The company’s stock went up after the clinical results were released, and the girlfriend made a profit of around $849,000, a 118% gain, according to the indictment.
In another instance, Lewis gave his two pilots a tip-off about how flooding in Queensland in early 2019 had caused material financial losses to Australian Agricultural Company, the indictment says. Lewis, who owned a majority of the company’s stock, got non-public information from a Tavistock employee who sat on its board that the cattle deaths and financial losses wouldn’t be covered by its insurance or the Australian government, per the indictment.
Lewis shared this information with the two pilots and urged them to sell off their stock, according to the indictment. The company’s stock fell the next day after it publicly announced its losses, but the pilots’ stockbroker couldn’t sell their shares quickly enough, according to the indictment.
“Just wish the Boss would have given us a little earlier heads up,” one of the pilots wrote in an email to their stockbroker, per the indictment.
The indictment also says that Lewis conspired with others and used a series of shell companies, false filings, and misleading statements to hide his ownership of shares in Mirati.
The indictment asks Lewis to forfeit all property linked to proceeds from the transactions.
Insider has approached Lewis’s lawyer, Tottenham Hotspur, and the Tavistock Group for comment, but at the time of publication, had not received responses.
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