MANHATTAN (CN) — British billionaire and owner of the Tottenham Hotspur Premier League football club Joe Lewis pleaded not guilty Wednesday to counts of illegal insider trading and was released on $300 million personal recognizance bond secured by his superyacht and a private plane.
Lewis, 86, was arrested in New York shortly after sunrise Wednesday on an indictment that includes 13 counts of insider trading. Prosecutors say he tipped nonpublic corporate secrets to girlfriends, personal assistants, friends and his pilots, earning them millions of dollars illegally.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams, who announced the charges Tuesday night in a video, said in a release that Lewis stands accused of “orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme” that utilized his access to corporate boardrooms to feed inside tips to friends and lovers.
“Those folks then traded on that inside information — and made millions of dollars in the stock market — because, thanks to Lewis, those bets were a sure thing,” Williams said. "That’s classic corporate corruption. It’s cheating. And it’s against the law — laws that apply to everyone, no matter who you are.”
According the unsealed indictment, Lewis’ employees, romantic partners, and friends realized millions of dollars in illegal profits from tips related to the stocks of Solid Biosciences, Mirati Therapeutics, Australian Agricultural Company, and BCTG Acquisition Corporation.
Lewis entered a plea of not guilty at his arraignment before Magistrate Judge Valerie Figueredo, and waived a public reading of the indictment.
He was released on a $300 million personal recognizance bond, which is $50 million greater than the $250 million bond for embattled former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos referred to in December 2022 as "the largest ever pretrial bond."
The $300 million bond was secured by Lewis' 323-foot superyacht named the Aviva, and a private aircraft.
Two pilots — Bryan “Marty" Waugh and Patrick O’Connor — were also arrested and presented before a federal magistrate judge on Wednesday afternoon.
The indictment says Lewis tipped both pilots to non-public information about a company's upcoming announcement of favorable clinical results, and then gave each a short term loan of half a million dollars in October 2019 so that they could buy the company's stock before the clinical trial news became public.
"Boss is helping us out and told us to get ASAP,” O'Connor texted a friend according to the indictment, adding in the chat that "All conversations on app is encrypted so all good. No one can ever see."
Both men also pleaded not guilty Wednesday and were released on bail of $250,000.
The case has been assigned U.S. District Judge Jessica G. L. Clarke, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
With a fortune that Forbes estimates at $6.1 billion, Lewis has a portfolio of investments ranging from real estate and energy to agriculture and sports. He purchased Tottenham, the North London soccer team in 2001.
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