After vehemently denying any wrongdoing last year, the Australian Agricultural Company's powerful majority shareholder, Joe Lewis, is pleading guilty to insider trading charges in New York.
The low profile British billionaire owner of the Tavistock Group, which holds about 52 per cent of the 200-year-old AACo beef business, faces sentencing in March.
In the meantime, one of his companies, Broad Bay, has been ordered by a Manhattan federal court to pay about $76 million ($US50m) in penalties in connection with guilty pleas to securities fraud.
The US prosecutor's case against Lewis included allegations he relayed unreported information about the impact of extraordinary flooding on four of AACo's Queensland Gulf properties in early 2019 to his private jet pilots, suggesting they sell their AACo shares.
They were also indicted by the court.
The Tavistock Group's AA Trust directors on the AACo board at the time, Dr Shehan Dissanayake and Neil Reisman, have denied leaking the information to their boss.
Dr Dissanayake departed AACo late last year, after 13 years as a director, to become Tavistock's global chairman.
Lewis was initially pleading not guilty to allegations involving multiple investment interests, with his lawyers claiming the charges were an egregious error.
This week he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, which carries a potential five-year prison sentence, and two counts of securities fraud, which each could involve up to 20 years gaol.
So embarrassed
"I knew at the time what I was doing was wrong and I'm so embarrassed," the Bloomberg News service reported of him telling the court.
"While I possessed material non-public information about certain publicly traded companies, I agreed to make recommendations to three other parties to buy that stock."
Prosecutors have alleged between 2013 and 2021, he abused his access to corporate boardrooms by passing insider information to his contacts, who allegedly reaped millions of dollars from their stock market bets.
The allegations include Lewis recommending his girlfriend invest in a biotech company prior to positive clinical trial results being released publicly.
Tavistock Group owns stakes in a wide range of hospitality, property, sports, finance, life sciences and energy companies, making him worth an estimated $9 billion.
The group's steady acquisition of shares in Brisbane-based AACo began in the early 2000s, breaking 50pc last year.
AACo owns Australia's largest cattle herd - about 433,000 head - on properties spread over 6.4m hectares in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Andrew Marshall
Andrew Marshall is the group agribusiness writer for ACM's state agricultural weeklies and websites. He is a former editor at The Land and has worked in various Rural Press group roles in Canberra, North Richmond (NSW) and Toowoomba (Qld).
Andrew Marshall is the group agribusiness writer for ACM's state agricultural weeklies and websites. He is a former editor at The Land and has worked in various Rural Press group roles in Canberra, North Richmond (NSW) and Toowoomba (Qld).
