The kindly old billionaire who blurted out insider tips
Joe Lewis (pictured), the 87-year-old British billionaire whose family owns Tottenham Hotspur football club, will avoid being sent to prison for insider trading, says the Financial Times.
A federal judge in the US agreed to a £5m fine and three years probation instead, on account of Lewis’s cooperation with the court and his advanced age. Lewis pleaded guilty to fraud charges in January following an investigation in which he was found to have passed on stock tips to friends, private pilots and a girlfriend.
The recipients made more than half a million dollars trading on inside information that Lewis had acquired through his seats on various corporate boards. In court, a “visibly shaken” Lewis admitted to his “terrible mistake” and apologised. Lewis is “no ordinary worshipper of Mammon”, says Alex Brummer on This is Money. The East End boy, born to an immigrant family over a pub in Bow, “always loved a deal”. He dropped out of school as a teenager to join his father’s catering business, going on to launch a chain of restaurants, before selling out for £30m in 1979. He then grew his fortune with big speculative bets on the forex markets in the 1980s and 1990s. He is thought to have been among the speculators who cashed in alongside George Soros on Black Wednesday.
That fortune is now tied up in Tavistock, the holding company for Lewis’s “sprawling empire” of more than 200 companies, including the “crown jewel” Tottenham, across 13 countries ranging from Australia to Patagonia. Lewis enjoyed a peripatetic lifestyle that revolved around Miami, the Bahamas and Buenos Aires aboard his £195m super yacht (now held as collateral by the US authorities). He has a net worth of some £5.1bn, according to the most recent Sunday Times Rich List.
His “old pals in the City of London were flummoxed” by news of the charges, says The Times. Character witness statements painted a picture of a “kindly old gentleman”, whose lapse of judgement were put down to “hubris and childish exuberance”. He once said that one of the rewards of success is “the quiet enjoyment of it. Being on the front pages of a newspaper doesn’t allow that.” After the judgment he set off again for the Bahamas, no doubt with the intention of getting off them again for good.