Joe Lewis at a Tottenham vs. Arsenal soccer match in north London in 2011.
Matthew Ashton | Corbis Sport | Getty Illustrations or photos
Joe Lewis, a British billionaire and the owner of the Tottenham Hotspur soccer workforce, has been billed in the U.S. with involvement in insider investing, a federal prosecutor announced Tuesday.
The Southern District of New York indicted Lewis, alleging the 86-year-previous businessman schemed for yrs to abuse his entry to company boardrooms “and continuously furnished inside of info to his romantic partners, his individual assistants, his private pilots and his good friends,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams stated in a video assertion, including that Lewis orchestrated “a brazen insider trading plan.”
“Joe Lewis is a wealthy male, but as we allege, he made use of insider details as a way to compensate his staff members or to shower presents on his pals and enthusiasts,” Williams said. “That’s vintage corporate corruption. It is really dishonest and it can be towards the legislation, rules that use to anyone no make a difference who you are.”
Lewis’ lawyer, David M. Zornow, claimed the federal government created “an egregious error in judgment” with the expenses, contacting Lewis a person of “impeccable integrity and prodigious accomplishment.”
“Mr. Lewis has appear to the US voluntarily to response these unwell-conceived charges, and we will defend him vigorously in court,” Zornow explained in a statement.
The United Kingdom and the U.S. have a bilateral extradition relationship under a treaty signed in 2003 that bolsters every country’s authority to extradite people deemed serious offenders who are wished in relationship with a range of crimes.
Lewis’ net worth is $6.1 billion, according to a Forbes estimate. He launched the personal investment company Tavistock Group and grew to become a greater part proprietor of London-dependent Tottenham a lot more than 20 years back immediately after Alan Sugar marketed his majority stake in the group for the equivalent of about $50 million nowadays.
Forbes’ annual rankings say the staff is the ninth most important soccer club in the world, worth $2.8 billion.
NBC News has reached out to Tavistock and Tottenham for comment on Lewis’ indictment.