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Donald Trump has pardoned 88-year-old British billionaire Joe Lewis, the former owner of Tottenham Hotspur football club, who pleaded guilty to insider trading in the US last year.

A White House official on Thursday said Lewis had “requested a pardon so that he may receive medical treatment and visit his grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the United States”.

The official added Lewis, a UK citizen who lives in the Bahamas, “admitted he made a terrible mistake, did not fight extradition in the case, and paid a $5mn fine”.

Lewis said: “I am pleased all of this is now behind me, and I can enjoy retirement and watch as my family and extended family continue to build our businesses based on the quality and pursuit of excellence that has become our trademark.”

Lewis was charged in New York in 2023 following an investigation in which he was found to have passed on stock tips to friends, private pilots and a girlfriend. Prosecutors claimed the recipients of his tips made more than half a million dollars by trading on the non-public information, to which Lewis had been privy through his seats on various corporate boards.

However, a federal judge last year decided against incarcerating a contrite Lewis, in part because of his advanced age.

The move is the latest in a series of high-profile pardons by the US president. Last month, he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of crypto exchange Binance, who had pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges. Trump has also commuted the sentence of former Republican congressman George Santos, who was convicted of wire fraud and identity theft.

The Lewis family maintains a controlling stake in Enic, the entity which owns Tottenham Hotspur, and recently oversaw a boardroom shake-up at the Premier League club. Daniel Levy, chair of Tottenham for almost 25 years, departed in September, and was replaced by Peter Charrington, an Enic board member and former private banker.

People close to the family at the time said the changes were part of a broader push to achieve more success on the pitch.

Former Arsenal chief executive Vinai Venkatesham joined Tottenham in April, while the Lewis family injected £100mn into the club in October.

Lewis transferred his stake in Enic to a family trust in 2022. While he is not a beneficiary of the trust, other members of his family are.

Born to an immigrant family above an east London pub in 1937, Lewis dropped out of school as a teenager and joined his father’s catering business. He found early success with a chain of themed restaurants before relocating from the UK to the Bahamas in 1979.

He went on to build a reputation in financial markets for big, speculative trades on currencies, including a profitable bet against sterling ahead of Black Wednesday in 1992, when Britain exited the European exchange rate mechanism.

A person close to the Lewis family on Thursday said: “Over his long business career, Joe has been a visionary, creating businesses across the world which multiple generations of his family are now taking forward. This is why there is so much more to the Joe Lewis story than this one event.”