Scottish Daily Mail

Top golfer pays back £637k profit from insider share tips

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GOLFER Phil Mickelson has been forced to hand back £637,000 in ‘ill gotten gains’ from an insider trading scam.

US watchdogs alleged the 2013 Open Championsh­ip winner was passed a tip about a company stock by William Walters, a friend and highrollin­g Las Vegas gambler.

Mickelson, 45, who has three children with wife Amy (with whom he is pictured), earns around £30m a year and is the second highest earning golfer of all time behind Tiger Woods.

But the three-time Masters champion owed Walters money after running up gambling debts and planned to use some of the profits he made from the trade to pay back his old friend. The trades were revealed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission while it was investigat­ing trading in shares of Dean Foods, America’s largest milk processor.

Walters was arrested by the FBI at a Las Vegas resort on Wednesday. He is alleged to have been given inside informatio­n by Dean Foods chairman Thomas Davis about its plans to spin off one of its subsidiari­es. During a conversati­on in July 2012, Walters passed on the tip to Mickelson, who bought £1.6m of shares in Dean Foods the next day. When the stock rose, Mickelson sold the shares at a huge profit and paid off his bets with the proceeds from the trade.

Walters – often considered the most successful sports gamblers in the US – made almost £12m from the trades. Insider trading is illegal in the US, as it is the UK, and Walters and Davis, who met 20 years ago on a golf course, went to great lengths to conceal their arrangemen­t, the SEC said.

They used disposable, pre-paid mobile phones and created ‘a secret code’ for Dean Foods, a Dallas company, referring to it as the Dallas Cowboys American football team.

Investigat­ors had not accused Mickelson of participat­ing in insider trading, but said he had been ‘unjustly enriched’ through his trading. His lawyer said he had been an ‘innocent bystander’ but added that he takes ‘full responsibi­lity’ for being caught up in the SEC’s probe.

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