The former JJB Sports chief executive Chris Ronnie has been ordered to pay nearly £633,000 after being convicted of fraud last year.
Ronnie was sentenced to four years in prison and banned from being a company director for eight years after a jury unanimously found him guilty of taking about £1m in backhanders, then trying to cover up his crime. His early release date is likely to be 9 December 2016.
In a hearing at Southwark crown court on Thursday morning, Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith said Ronnie, who watched proceedings via videolink from prison, would have to pay within three months or have an additional five years added to his sentence.
Mark Thompson, the head of the Serious Fraud Office proceeds of crime division, said: “The SFO is committed to ensuring that fraudsters do not retain the benefit of their crimes. We will take steps to make sure the order is satisfied within the period set by the court.”
A schedule of assets from which Ronnie will need to secure his payment under the confiscation order includes a home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, which is already on the market, and a 50% share in a house in Marbella, Spain, as well as a Range Rover and a 258CR registration number, worth £4,000. A Rolex Cosmograph Daytona worth £5,000 and a Panerai Luminor Marina watch valued at £3,000 are also listed among his assets.
At the time of his conviction, the judge said Ronnie was guilty of a “very greedy” fraud and had not shown “any sign of remorse or even embarrassment about what you have done”.
On Thursday, Loraine-Smith said Ronnie, looking slim and dressed in a dark blue T-shirt, was “almost unrecognisable” from the time of his conviction.
He was found guilty of three counts of fraud over three six-figure cash payments made to him by suppliers during his tenure as JJB chief executive. He also was found guilty of two charges of providing false information.
The payments to Ronnie, which he partly used to buy a luxury holiday home in Florida that has since been sold, were not disclosed to the JJB board.
Ronnie, a former executive at Sports Direct under Mike Ashley, ran JJB between August 2007 and March 2009, during which time its share price collapsed from more than £2 to less than 3p.
JJB never recovered from the period of decline under Ronnie and went on to collapse in September 2012, with the loss of thousands of jobs. The following month, it was announced that Sports Direct had purchased part of the business, including 20 stores, the brand and its website, for £24m.
