Joe Lewis charged with insider trading — but what does it mean for Tottenham Hotspur?
It was shortly after 6am in Singapore, where Tottenham Hotspur’s power brokers are gathered for the club’s pre-season tour, that the news broke.
It wasn’t about Harry Kane or the club’s search for a centre-back, it was far more serious.
Joe Lewis, whose company ENIC Sports Inc owns the vast majority of shares in Spurs, had been indicted for “orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme”. This involved passing information to “romantic partners and his private pilots,” according to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams.
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Lewis’s lawyer David M. Zornow said in a statement to Bloomberg on Wednesday: “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 claims in the 29-page indictment read like the plot of a television drama, involving companies with interests as diverse as Australian cattle farming and genetic diseases, glamorous locations around the world, and a 98-metre superyacht.
One woman, referred to as “the Girlfriend” is alleged to have made $849,000 (now £657,000) after a tip-off from Lewis about buying stock while they were staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, in 2019.
On another occasion, it is claimed one of Lewis’ pilots — Pilot-1 — texted a friend to say: “Boss is helping us out and told us to get ASAP”, referring to buying stock in an oncology company called Mirati Therapeutics. Lewis, it is claimed, then transferred his pilots $500,000 each to do just that.
Another time, the indictment says one of the pilots did not receive
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