KEY POINTS:
Joe Lewis, the privacy-loving billionaire who, along with Daniel Levy, controls English football club Tottenham Hotspur, has just taken one of his biggest gambles.
He has invested US$860 million ($1.2 billion) for a 7 per cent stake in Bear Stearns, the investment bank that has been the worst casualty of the credit market crisis.
Even for a fabled currency speculator who won hundreds of millions of pounds on sterling's ignominious exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, this is a seriously ballsy bet.
The 70-year-old Briton has been secretly building his stake in Bear Stearns over the past month, using a string of holding companies registered in the Bahamas, where he has been a tax exile since 1979.
He is now the bank's largest shareholder, controlling a bigger stake than the company's beleaguered chief executive, Jimmy Cayne, who has been feeling the heat since June, when two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed and triggered a financial panic.
According to Forbes magazine, Lewis is the world's 369th richest person, with a fortune weighing in at US$2.5 billion.
As a chunk of his net worth, the bet on Bear Stearns is huge - but no more so than the awe-inspiring US$1 billion-plus positions he took on currencies such as the British pound in 1992, and the Mexican peso three years later.
Alongside George Soros, Lewis is one of the most successful currency speculators of his generation, known to many in the foreign exchange world as the Boxer - a tribute to his heavyweight status and his namesake, the US champion Joe Louis.
Visitors to his Bahamas mansion say that every room has a screen showing the latest foreign exchange prices, and he is still a keen speculator on the markets.
Much of his wealth, though, is spread across dozens of industries, funnelled mainly through his investment vehicle Tavistock Group, which boasts interests in 170 companies in 15 countries.
It is through Tavistock that Lewis has his holding in Enic, which was once envisioned as a holding company for dozens of sports teams and controls Tottenham Hotspur.
Not a bad empire for a self-made man born in London's East End, who dropped out of school at 15 to work at his father's pub-restaurant. Lewis likes to tell the story of how he would lug a bus stop sign from around the corner to outside the restaurant, so that travellers would be more likely to drop in.
This and other entrepreneurial ideas helped him turn the family business into a chain that he finally sold in 1979.
Fleeing capital gains tax in the UK, he set up shop as a currency trader in the Bahamas, and has never looked back.
Now he has homes in four countries, and has seemingly been able to stay self-effacing and without enemies through his long career.
His association with Irish magnates Dermot Desmond, JP McManus and John Magnier got him into hot water over a property deal with the Irish Government, but although an inquiry criticised Lewis for failing to co-operate, all four were cleared.
- Independent
