NEW YORK — British billionaire Joe Lewis, whose family owns the Tottenham Hotspur football club, pleaded guilty Wednesday to insider trading and conspiracy in New York.
The 86-year-old businessman entered a plea in Manhattan federal court six months after he was charged in the case. He was released on $300 million bail, with a yacht and a private plane as collateral.
Lewis said nothing as he left the court, and he was protected from photographers by his assistants, a lawyer and an umbrella.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said the plea deal includes the largest financial penalty for insider trading in a decade.
Broad Bay Limited, which Lewis owns, will pay more than $50 million in financial penalties, prosecutors said in a news release.
“Today’s guilty pleas reaffirm — as I said when I announced the charges against Joseph Lewis six months ago — that the law applies to everyone, no matter who you are or how much wealth you have,” Williams said.
He said Lewis misused inside information gleaned from corporate boardrooms to inform on his friends, employees and romantic interests.
Federal sentencing guidelines call for a prison sentence of 18 to 24 months, although Lewis can seek less than that. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 28.
As part of the guilty plea, Lewis and Broad Bay Limited have agreed that Lewis and his companies will resign and surrender control of board seats and participation in board meetings for every company publicly traded in the United States. They also agreed to relinquish ownership of certain investments during the five-year trial period and to cooperate with the U.S. government’s ongoing investigation and prosecution.
Lewis has a fortune that Forbes estimates at $6.1 billion and assets in real estate, biotechnology, energy, agriculture and more. In 2001 he bought a stake in Tottenham Hotspur, one of England’s most legendary football clubs.
Under his ownership, the Premier League club built a state-of-the-art stadium at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.
Today, a trust benefiting from members of Lewis’ family is the majority shareholder of ENIC, the holding company that owns the team. Lewis himself is not a beneficiary of that trust and relinquished operational control of the club in October 2022, company documents show.
Lewis’ Tavistock Group owns some or all of more than 200 companies worldwide, according to its website, and its art collection includes works by Picasso, Matisse, Degas and more. His business associates include Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Justin Timberlake, with whom he built a Bahamian oceanfront resort in 2010.
According to the indictment against him, Lewis’s investments in several companies gave him control over board seats, where he placed employees who let him know what they were learning behind the scenes. Prosecutors said Lewis improperly shared confidential information with his chosen recipients between 2019 and 2021 and encouraged them to profit from the tips.
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Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.