July 26 (UPI) — Federal authorities in New York charged British billionaire Joe Lewis with insider trading for allegedly sharing corporate information with people close to him.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, announced Tuesday that the Southern District of New York had indicted Lewis for “orchestrating a brazen insider-trading scheme” that saw people he shared information with net millions of dollars.
“We allege that for years, Joe Lewis abused his access to corporate boardrooms and repeatedly provided inside information to his romantic partners, his personal assistants, his private pilots and his friends,” said Williams.
“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 Lewis’ use of inside information as a way to compensate employees or shower lovers and friends with gifts represented “classic corporate corruption,” or cheating which was against the law.
The indictment on 16 securities fraud counts and three of conspiracy alleges that in some instances Lewis loaned funds to people to enable them to benefit from information he leaked, including $1 million to two of his pilots in 2019 to bankroll purchases of stock in Nasdaq-listed biotech firm Mirati.
“Boss lent Marty and I $500,000 each for this,” said a text from one of the pilots cited in the 29-page indictment obtained by Bloomberg. The text further stated “the Boss has inside info” because “otherwise why would he make us invest”.
“Loan payback for MRTX,” the second pilot wrote following a 16.7% surge in the price of Mirati shares on the back of positive results from a clinical trial run by the San Diego-based company.
Lawyer David Zornow, who represents the 86-year-old Lewis, said his client had traveled to the United States of his own accord to clear his name of what Zornow called “ill-conceived charges.”
He added that the indictment was an “egregious error in judgment”.
Lewis made his fortune from currency trading in the 1980s and 1990s before purchasing a controlling stake in the Premier football league side, Tottenham Hotspur, for $28 million in 2001.