Belgo director faces jail over share leaks

Timothy Power, 44, helped a friend make tens of thousands of pounds profit by leaking sensitive information about the deal in 1997.

He skipped bail and went on the run after being arrested in 2003 following an investigation by the Financial Services Authority and was not recaptured until April last year.

As the operations director at Belgo in the late 1990s, Power was a key figure in its £25 million takeover of some of London's leading restaurants, including The Ivy and Le Caprice.

A flagrant self-publicist, Power once claimed to be a "one-man crusade against mediocrity in restaurants."

Now divorced from his heiress wife, he was convicted eight years ago of illegally using the vanity number plate 'P9WER' on his Ferrari.

In 1997 Belgo Group Plc was acquired from parent company TRM Tisch by Lonsdale Holdings Plc for £9.8million.

Southwark Crown Court has heard how Power tipped off company director Euan Carlisle, 48, who denied ever receiving the information.

Carlisle was accused of a string of insider dealing charges but the case was thrown out by Judge James Wadsworth QC.

The judge said the Department for Business Enterprise, who brought the charges, had no way of proving who had tipped him off because the jury was not told Power had already pleaded guilty.

Power was working as the operations manager of Belgo, which is famed for its "moules, frites et bieres", when he twice passed on information allowing another to make thousands of pounds by buying up shares in the firm.

Around the time negotiations began in late 1997 there may have been rumours that The Belgo Group Plc was looking for a buyer, the court heard.

But nobody on the outside knew property developer Lonsdale Holdings Plc was the front runner.

Then in November 2007, it was alleged, Carlisle began using his dormant share dealing account to invest in Lonsdale.

Prosecutor Sarah Whitehouse claimed Power had told Carlisle that the take-over or merger was going to happen.

"Acting on that information Mr Carlisle, using a share dealing account that he had not used for some time, bought 700,000 shares in Lonsdale," she said.

By mid January 1998 Lonsdale had clinched the Belgo deal and Carlisle was alleged to have snapped up another 100,000 "knock down" shares in the successful property firm.

In April he allegedly ran with another tip off from Power, buying more than two million shares in Belgo ahead of its investment in three restaurants, Daphne's, The Collection and Pasha.

It was claimed he ploughed nearly £250,000 into Belgo, netting himself another £20,000 when he sold his holding between May and June of that year.

Ms Whitehouse said the profit was not as large as before, but "still a return of around 10 per cent in the space of a few weeks".

She accepted that no incriminating taped conversations or letters existed between the pair, only a "very large amount" of phone traffic.

Power, of East Sheen, admitted two counts of insider dealing relating to passing information on to Carlisle.

Carlisle, of Wimbledon, pleaded not guilty to eight counts of insider dealing between November 1997 and May 1998 and the case against him was thrown out after his counsel submitted that he had no case to answer.

Power's guilty pleas can only be reported now at the end of Carlisle's trial.

In 1998 his marriage to Chantal Brenninkmeyer, heiress to the Dutch dynasty behind the C & A stores chain, ended in divorce.

In May 2001 Power was sentenced to 120 hours community service for illegally using the vanity number plate 'P9WER' on his Ferrari.

Power, then living in Parsons Green, blamed an oversight by his two chauffeurs, who were in charge of his £3m fleet of high performance cars.

He told the court: "I was very, very spoilt and cosseted as far as that goes. When I was married to my wife, everything was taken care of by the bank she owned."

Power will now be sentenced at a later date. The maximum jail sentence for insider dealing is seven years.