Former JJB boss sells Wilmslow home to pay court confiscation order
THE former boss of JJB Sports Chris Ronnie has paid the lion’s share of a £633,000 confiscation ordered by the courts, having completed the sale of his house.
The Cheshire businessman, 53, was jailed for four years for fraud in December 2014, after a trial in London.
In December 2015, he was given three months to pay a confiscation order of around £633,000 or face a further five years behind bars. Last month, Ronnie was given more time to pay as the sale of his Wilmslow home completed.
The Serious Fraud Office has confirmed to TheBusinessDesk that a total payment of £527,484.70 has now been made, leaving just over £105,000 outstanding.
TheBusinessDesk.com understands that the original confiscation order amount took into account the value of his Wilmslow home and that the shortfall is due to the house having to be sold for substantially less than its original valuation.
The remaining monies owed on the order are now subject to a defence application, the SFO told TheBusinessDesk.
Although an application is yet to be submitted, it is expected that Ronnie will ask the court to acknowledge that the outstanding amount is unrealisable and that the matter be considered settled.
Jailed after being found to have taken more than £1m in kickbacks from suppliers, the former squash player ran JJB between August 2007 and March 2009, during which time its share price tumbled from more than £2 to less than 3p.
Wigan-based 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”.
