British billionaire Joe Lewis, owner of Tottenham Hotspur, was arrested on Wednesday in New York.
He is facing charges related to insider trading and is scheduled to appear in court.
Lewis, 86, is charged with providing inside information to lovers and coworkers for years in a “brazen” scam that netted millions of dollars.
Lewis, who resides in the Bahamas, and two other accomplices were indicted, according to an announcement made on Tuesday by the Southern District of New York’s attorney, Damian Williams.
“The defendants were arrested this morning and will be presented later today,” Williams’s office said in a statement.
Lewis, according to the prosecution, “abused his access to corporate board rooms for years and repeatedly provided inside information to his romantic partners, personal assistants, private pilots, and friends.”
“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.
The attorney alleges that Lewis passed on the inside information as a way of compensating employees or giving gifts to friends, describing the scheme as “classic corporate corruption.”
Lewis faces 16 charges of securities fraud, the most serious of which carries a 25-year maximum penalty, and three counts of conspiracy, each of which carries a five-year maximum term.