AustAg’s billionaire investor Joe Lewis pleads guilty in US to insider trading

Billionaire and Australian Agriculture’s biggest shareholder Joe Lewis has pleaded guilty in a US court to insider trading.

John McCarthy

Jan 25, 2024, updated Jan 25, 2024

Tottenham Hotspur owner Joe Lewis (left) in the stands with chairman Daniel Levy (right)

Lewis, who also heads the Tavistock Group, was charged by the US Attorney in Manhattan Damian Williams “for orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme” in which he passed on information about his companies to his private pilots, friends, personal assistants and romantic partners.

US authorities said that the fraud netted millions of dollars in profit.

Lewis pleaded guilty to conspiracy and two counts of securities fraud as part of a deal with prosecutors.

Lewis owns England’s Tottenham Hotspur football club, now coached by Ausralian Ange Posteglou, and just over 50 per cent of Australian Agriculture, which in turn owns about 1 per cent of the Australia’s land mass and 6.4 million hectares of Queensland grazing land.

The AACo portfolio includes foodlots and properties like the Canobie Station, near Cloncurry, Carrum Station and the Dalgonally Station, both near Julia Creek, the Avon and Austral Downs station which spans the Queensland-NT border and the Goonoo farm and feedlot near Emerald.

Part of the case brought against Lewis was that he passed on information about the impact of floods in Queensland to his pilots. Those two pilots have also been indicted for securities fraud, however the information allegedly passed on to them in relation to the floods came too late for them to take any action.

Lewis’s two representatives on the Aust Ag board denied leaking the information to him.

In another instance, according to the indictment, Lewis told a girlfriend to invest in a biotech company in July 2019, before the results of a clinical trial by the company were made public.

He then allegedly logged into her bank account himself and used $700,000 to invest into the company, eventually netting a profit of $849,000.

“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,” the US District Attorney said.

Lewis told the court he knew what he was doing was wrong.

“I am so embarrassed and I apologize to the court for my conduct,” he said.

“While I possessed material non-public information about certain publicly traded companies, I agreed to make recommendations to three other people to purchase stock in those companies.”

One of his companies, Broad Bay Limited, has also been fined $US50 million penalty for securities fraud.

Lewis has yet to be sentenced and the charges he pleaded guilty to have a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison. However, reports from the US said the federal guidelines called for a sentence of between 18 and 24 months and Lewis would have the right to appeal any sentence that included prison time.

Williams previously said said none of the actions taken by Lewis were necessary and Lewis, worth an estimated $10 billion and owner of the Tottenham Hotspurs football club, was a wealthy man, but had used the information to compensate employees or to shower gifts on his friends and lovers.

“It’s classic corporate corruption,” Williams said.

“It’s cheating and it’s against the law.”