Former JJB Sports boss Chris Ronnie has obtained a £105,000 discount on a confiscation order issued after he was convicted of fraud in 2014.
In December, Ronnie was given three months to pay £633,000 after being convicted of fraud in 2014 or have an additional five years added to his four-year sentence. He was later given an extension to that timetable, giving him until June to make payment.
It is understood Ronnie has now agreed to pay £527,484.70 after his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, which assessors had estimated was worth £170,000, was sold for less than £80,000.
Ronnie’s defence team will now apply for that amount to be formally recognised and the confiscation order satisfied. A spokesman for the Serious Fraud Office, which took Ronnie to court, said it was expected that the amount handed over by Ronnie would be accepted as sufficient and he would avoid the additional five years in prison.
A schedule of assets from which Ronnie was to secure his payment under the confiscation order included the Wilmslow property and a 50% share in a house in Marbella, Spain, as well as a Range Rover, a 258CR registration number, worth £4,000, and a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona worth £5,000.
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.
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”.
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 and 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.
The fraud came to light after JJB executives called in the Office of Fair Trading in 2009 – in exchange for immunity – to investigate the possibility that the chain had fixed prices on football shirts when Ronnie was at the helm with rival Sports Direct, the sportswear firm run by the Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley. The OFT brought in the SFO to help with its inquiries, which cleared Sports Direct of wrongdoing.
Their investigation found that at the time the fraud was committed in 2007 and 2008, Ronnie owed more than £11m to an Icelandic bank. He had borrowed the sum to acquire a 29% stake in JJB in 2007 alongside another investor. He then took charge of the company.
Ronnie, a former executive at Sports Direct under Ashley, ran JJB between August 2007 and March 2009, during which time its share price slumped 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.
