Phone calls from billionaires to City editors are a pretty rare event. But Joe Lewis, who has just escaped incarceration for passing on insider trading tips to women friends, employees and pilots on his private aircraft, is no ordinary worshipper of Mammon.
He has always loved a deal. His fortune largely was accumulated on the forex markets. He saw his run-in with ferocious federal prosecutors in Manhattan over insider trading charges as an opportunity for a bargain.
Rather than end his days in jail like the fraudster Bernard Madoff, he fully co-operated with prosecutors and the court, telling Judge Jessica G L Clarke that he was ‘so embarrassed’ by his conduct.
In the end, he agreed to pay nearly $50 million (£40 million) in financial penalties, the biggest insider trading settlement for a decade.
His contrition, fine and his advanced years were designed to avert an 18-month-to-two year stretch in prison.
The East End boy, born over a pub in Bow, London 87 years ago, has never fully given up on his modest origins, in spite of a peripatetic lifestyle which has revolved around Miami, the Bahamas and Buenos Aires.
When he called me from his superyacht on the Thames in 2009 to press the case for seats on the board for his nominees at pub group Mitchells & Butlers, there was no mistaking the casual, cockney cadence of his voice.
As someone with pub culture pulsing through his veins, his personal involvement in a bitter bid battle for one of Britain’s biggest bars operators now makes a great deal of sense.
His second call, from a new property in Argentina, where he coolly mentioned he had set up home with a girlfriend, was from the perspective of a UK tax exile wanting to make a point about the bonkers British tax regime.
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Lewis is anything but conventional. A friend, a City lawyer who worked with him on the purchase of a Spurs stake from fellow East Ender Alan Sugar in 2001, was instructed to meet on a South Florida golf course.
B est-known as a currency trader who accumulated a fortune in the 1980s and 1990s, he is understood to have been among the speculators who cashed in alongside George Soros on Black Wednesday. In common with New York hedge fund guru Soros, Lewis won big by betting big against sterling and the Bank of England when Britain was ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precursor of the euro, in September 1992.
He has never fully cut ties with the world he left behind in London. Among his first jobs was working in hospitality at his father’s company Tavistock Banqueting.
It is no coincidence that many decades later that the holding company for his vast global interests is named Tavistock Group and boasts the slogan ‘Committed to Excellence’. It is a sprawling empire comprising more than 200 companies in 15 different geographies ranging from vast ranch holdings in Australia to an energy group in Patagonia, to the magnificent St Regis Hotel which dominates the skyline in Atlanta, Georgia. Tavistock also owns the elegant Lake Nona Golf & Country Club in Orlando, Florida.
The crown jewel of his empire has long been the Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur. Unlike the division’s other big clubs, Spurs has had limited success on the field of play since the glory days of the 1960s. Its great triumph is its state-of-the-art stadium, regarded as the finest in Europe, with its high tech, hospitality facilities.
It is an events factory in an unfashionable part of London, which among other things is home to America’s National Football League (NFL) in the UK and Formula One electric go-karting.
It has also become a favoured entertainment venue for star performers such as Beyonce.
Under the command of Daniel Levy, Lewis’s right-hand executive in Britain, Spurs has huge ambition to build bigger and better, and has engaged Rothschild & Co to put together a capital raise to build a luxury 180 room hotel and 50 apartments adjacent to the stadium. Majority ownership of Spurs was passed to the Lewis Family Trust in October 2022, which is managed by independent professionals. Lewis is not a beneficiary which means his legal difficulties in the US are insulated from potential infringement of Premier League rules on stewardship.
O ne of the great mysteries is the long-standing business and personal relationship between Lewis and Cambridge-educated Levy, who have been associates for more than three decades. There has long been unproven speculation that they are somehow related.
Not a great deal is known as to who will eventually inherit Tavistock and Lewis’s vast art collection, including Francis Bacon’s Triptych, when he eventually gives up the reins of power. He has two offspring, Charles Lewis and Vivienne Lewis Silverton. Daughter Vivienne sits on the Tavistock board and is seen by some as his most likely heir. But the secrets of Lewis’s closely guarded temple remain firmly locked.
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