Former JJB boss misses £600k confiscation deadline
SHAMED retail boss Chris Ronnie, the former chief executive of JJB Sports, has missed the deadline to pay a confiscation order of more than £600,000.
The Cheshire businessman, 53, was jailed for four years for fraud in December 2014, after a trial in London.
In December 2015, he was ordered to pay a confiscation order of of £632,662 within three months or face a further five years behind bars.
No payment has been made so far and TheBusinessDesk understands that Ronnie wants to be given more time to be able to release the equity in his house.
An extension application has been made and the hearing is expected to be held at Southwark Crown Court in May.
If the application is denied, Ronnie will face an enforcement hearing at a later date and at that point would have another five years added to his existing sentence.
Ronnie was jailed after being found to have taken more than £1m in kickbacks from suppliers while he was running Wigan-based JJB.
The former squash player ran the sports retailer between August 2007 and March 2009, during which time its share price tumbled 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.
Passing sentence at the time Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith told Ronnie, who used the illegal payments from suppliers to buy a property in Florida, his actions had been “dishonest in the extreme”.
He 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”.
