Tottenham insist criminal charges against Joe Lewis are “unconnected with the club”, after he was indicted in the US for “orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme”.
Lewis has been charged by New York prosecutors with 16 counts of securities fraud and three counts of conspiracy.
The billionaire is alleged to have “abused his access to corporate board rooms and repeatedly provided inside information” in order to “shower gifts on his friends and lovers”.
US attorney Damian Williams said Lewis “has been indicted and will face justice” for alleged crimes between 2013 and 2021.
A lawyer for Lewis said charging the 86-year-old was an “egregious error in judgment”.
It was unclear on Wednesday morning whether the indictment could raise significant issues for Lewis and Tottenham.
The Premier League owners’ and directors’ test is designed to stop people with criminal convictions owning a club. Lewis bought a controlling stake in Tottenham from Alan Sugar for £22million in 2001. But he ceased to be “a person with significant control” of Tottenham last year, following what the club described as a “reorganisation of the Lewis Family Trusts”, which hold the shares in Spurs.
A Tottenham spokesperson said: “This is a legal matter unconnected with the club and as such we have no comment.”
Lewis is based in the Bahamas and is not involved in the day-to-day running of Tottenham. He owns Tavistock Group, which has investments in more than 200 assets across 13 countries, and Forbes magazine puts his wealth at £4.73bn.
Insider trading is the buying and selling of a listed company’s shares or other securities, such as bonds or share options, based on information not available to the public.
In many countries, including the US and UK, insider trading is illegal as it is seen as giving an unfair advantage to those with access to the information.
Lewis is charged with 13 counts of securities fraud, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, three counts of securities fraud, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, and three counts of conspiracy, each of which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Williams said: “We allege that for years Joe Lewis abused access to corporate board rooms and repeatedly provided inside information to his romantic partners, his personal assistants, his pilots and his friends.
“Those folks then traded on that inside information and made millions of dollars on the stock market. Thanks to Lewis those bets were a sure thing.
“None of this was necessary. Joe Lewis is a wealthy man, but as we allege he used insider information to compensate his employees, or to shower gifts on his friends and lovers. That’s classic corporate corruption. It’s cheating and it’s against the law.”
Lewis’s lawyer David M. Zornow said in a statement to Bloomberg: “The government has made an egregious error in judgment in charging Mr Lewis, an 86-year-old man of impeccable integrity and prodigious accomplishment.
“Mr Lewis has come to the US voluntarily to answer these ill-conceived charges, and we will defend him vigorously in court.”
The Tavistock Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
