Tavistock’s Lewis facing charges
Billionaire developer pleads not guilty to insider trading, posts $300 million bail
NEW YORK — Joe Lewis, the British billionaire known in Central Florida for his Tavistock Group that developed Isleworth and Lake Nona, pleaded not guilty in New York on Wednesday to insider trading charges alleging that he fed corporate secrets to romantic partners, personal assistants, friends and his pilots, earning them millions of dollars illegally.
Lewis, whose family trust owns the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team, was released on $300 million bail, using a yacht and private plane as collateral, after he entered the plea in Manhattan federal court. Two of his pilots, Patrick O’Connor and Bryan ‘Marty’ Waugh, also pleaded not guilty to related charges and were each released on $250,000 bail.
All three must remain in the United States. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who announced the charges Tuesday night in a video, said Lewis was accused of “orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme” that utilized his access to corporate boardrooms to feed inside tips to friends and lovers.
“Those folks then traded on that inside information — and made millions of dollars in the stock market — because, thanks to Lewis, those bets were a sure thing,” Williams said. “That’s classic corporate corruption. It’s cheating. And it’s against the law — laws that apply to everyone, no matter who you are.”
David M. Zornow, an attorney for Lewis, said his client had come to the U.S. “to answer these ill-conceived charges” and would fight them vigorously.
“The government has made an egregious error in judgment in charging Mr. Lewis, an 86-year-old man of impeccable integrity and prodigious accomplishment,” Zornow said in a statement Tuesday.
Wearing a gray three-piece suit, Lewis
said, “Not guilty, your honor,” when asked for his plea. He and his lawyers declined to comment as they left court.
Lawyers for the pilots did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment.
Lewis was charged with 16 counts of securities fraud and three counts of conspiracy. O’Connor, 66, of Preston Hollow, New York, and Waugh, 64, of Lynchburg, Virginia, each face seven counts of securities fraud and a conspiracy count.
Lewis has a fortune that Forbes estimates at $6.1 billion, with assets in real estate, biotechnology, energy and agriculture. He bought an interest in Tottenham Hotspur, one of England’s most storied soccer clubs, in 2001.
Under his ownership, the Premier League club built a state-of-the-art stadium at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.
Today, a trust benefiting members of Mr. Lewis’ family is the majority owner of ENIC, the holding company that owns the team. Lewis himself is not a beneficiary of that trust and relinquished operational control of the club last October,
according to corporate filings.
Lewis’ Tavistock Group has stakes in more than 200 companies around the world, according to its website, and his art collection boasts works by Picasso, Matisse, Degas and more.
His business connections include Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Justin Timberlake, with whom he built a Bahamian oceanside resort that opened in 2010.
Lewis’ Tavistock investments in Central Florida and his community participation earned him the Orlando Sentinel’s 2006 Central Floridian of the Year award.
The newspaper’s editorial board wrote at the time, “Joe Lewis, the quiet billionaire whose Tavistock Holding Co. is developing Lake Nona, one of Central Florida’s most exclusive communities. Lewis’ vision was to build the [UCF] medical school at Lake Nona and light the fuse on an economic boom for the entire region. The medical school, Lewis and other Tavistock executives argued, would attract biomedical and life-science research facilities. That research would spin off high-technology businesses and attract even more companies here. A biomedical ‘cluster’ could form and that would be worth billions of dollars to the local and state economies.”
“This wasn’t just about building a medical school, it was about transforming the economy,” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said at the time. “And it simply doesn’t happen without Joe Lewis’ strong will to make it happen.”
According to the indictment, Lewis’ investments in various companies gave him control of board seats, where he placed associates who let him know what they learned behind the scenes. Prosecutors say Lewis improperly doled out that confidential information between 2019 and 2021 to his chosen recipients and urged them to profit off of it.
At one point, according to the indictment, he even loaned his two private pilots $500,000 apiece to buy stock in a cancer drug company that he knew had gotten — but not yet publicly disclosed — encouraging results from a clinical trial.
According to court papers, O’Connor texted a friend in connection with that loan to buy the stock, telling the friend the “Boss is helping us out and told us to get ASAP,” and assured the friend that “All conversations on app is encrypted so all good. No one can ever see.”
Lewis also gave the tip to his girlfriend, his personal assistant, a poker buddy and a friend with whom he had a romance, the indictment said. After the company announced the clinical trial data, the stock gained nearly 17% in a day, and Lewis’ friends and employees all eventually sold at a profit. The pilots repaid the loans at Lewis’ request, according to the indictment.
Another time, according to the filing, Lewis gleaned some closed-door information about a muscular dystrophy drug company in which he was a major investor.
The information allegedly included a planned financial move and some clinical trial news.
Lewis’ biotech hedge fund signed a confidentiality agreement that prohibited disclosing the information or trading on it. But according to the indictment, he told his girlfriend to buy the company’s stock, then told the pilots the same as they flew the couple to Massachusetts from Seoul, where the two had been staying.