Joe Lewis, the British billionaire and owner of the Tottenham Hotspur football team, has been criminally charged in New York for orchestrating a "brazen" insider trading scheme.

Prosecutors said Lewis exploited his access to corporate boardrooms by passing tips about companies in which he invested to friends, personal assistants, private pilots and romantic partners, enabling them to reap millions of dollars of profit.

"None of this was necessary. Joe Lewis is a wealthy man," US Attorney Damian Williams said in a video on the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.

"But as we allege he used inside information as a way to compensate his employees or shower gifts on his friends and lovers," Williams continued. "That's classic corporate corruption. It's cheating. And it's against the law."

Lewis, who founded the investment firm Tavistock Group, was charged with 16 counts of securities fraud and three counts of conspiracy, for alleged crimes spanning from 2013 to 2021.

"The government has made an egregious error in judgment in charging Mr Lewis, an 86-year-old man of impeccable integrity and prodigious accomplishment," Lewis' lawyer David Zornow said in an emailed statement.

"Mr Lewis has come to the US voluntarily to answer these ill-conceived charges, and we will defend him vigorously in court," Zornow added.

Lewis is worth US$6.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Insider trading has long been a focus of Williams' office, dating to 2009 when a crackdown began under one of his predecessors, Preet Bharara.

Lewis was accused of having from 2019 to 2021 passed material nonpublic information about companies such as Mirati Therapeutics, Solid Biosciences and Australian Agricultural. (Reuters)