It felt like an important moment in the history Tottenham.
Joe Lewis, one of Britain’s richest men, a billionaire many times over, was removed earlier this month as a “person of significant control” of Tottenham Hotspur, according to Companies House, the UK’s registrar of companies.
Could this be the end to the Lewis era? This is 22 years after Lewis first bought the house. Alan Sugar’s stake in the club?Could the Spurs veteran commodities trader be leaving Spurs?
No, not quite. The Lewis Family Trusts have been restructured with an eye to the long-term future. The club’s daily operations are unaffected.
The key point here is that Tottenham Hotspur is still essentially Joe Lewis’s club. ENIC Sports Inc. owns 85.56 per cent of the club’s shares. And, to quote from the club’s website, “a discretionary trust of which certain members of Mr J Lewis’s family are potential beneficiaries ultimately owns 70.12% of the share capital of ENIC.”
What about the 29.88%? “Mr D Levy and certain members of his family are potential beneficiaries of discretionary trusts” which ultimately own it.
It is still the most important relationship at Tottenham, between Lewis Levy and Daniel Levy. They have been working together for almost 30 years, ever since Lewis met Levy and made the young man — still in his early thirties — his protegee and point man. (Levy still tends to refer to the majority shareholder as ‘Mr Lewis’.
