Paramours, Pilots and a Poker Pal: Longtime Tottenham Owner Allegedly Shared Ins
The globe-trotting billionaire Joe Lewis , longtime owner of the London soccer club Tottenham Hotspur, spent the evening of July 25, 2019, with a woman who was then his girlfriend, dining on room service at the Four Seasons hotel in Seoul. U.S. prosecutors say he also fed her confidential information about coming disclosures by a life-sciences company that she used to make stock trades that ultimately netted her hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That tip and others that Lewis, 86, allegedly passed along to paramours, personal pilots and a poker buddy have placed him in the crosshairs of U.S. insider-trading rules . They have also made him an unusual defendant because of his advanced age, foreign residency, outsize wealth and apparent lack of personal motivation to secure insider profits himself.
Lewis, a resident of the Bahamas, surrendered in Manhattan last week and was charged with 16 counts of securities fraud and three counts of conspiracy. He is also facing civil charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission. A federal judge released him on a $300 million bond, a likely record figure that eclipsed the $250 million bond package for the onetime crypto darling Sam Bankman-Fried , who lived in a resort Lewis co-owned before being extradited to the U.S.
on fraud charges. During a brief court appearance, Lewis sat stoically next to his lawyer and only spoke once to plead not guilty. His bond was secured in part with his yacht Aviva, a 322-foot vessel he is no longer allowed to board, because of travel restrictions imposed by the court.
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