Former JJB boss gets reprieve from extended jail time
THE disgraced former boss of JJB Sports Chris Ronnie has been given more time to pay a confiscation order of over £600,000, having missed the deadline last month.
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.
An application for an extension was granted at Southwark Crown Court yesterday, giving Ronnie until June 17 to come up with the cash by selling his Wilmslow home.
In the last month Ronnie has paid £31,392.11, leaving just over £601,000 still to pay.
If Ronnie fails to pay by the new deadline in a month’s time, and another extension is not granted, he could 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”.
