Billionaire Mark Walter’s sale of the Los Angeles Lakers NBA franchise – announced just 14 months after purchasing it for $10billion – could have implications on the Cadillac Formula 1 team.<\/p>\n
Walter is the CEO of Guggenheim Partners, an investment company that co-owns Premier League team Chelsea via BlueCo, as well as numerous LA-based sports teams including the LA Dodgers baseball team.<\/p>\n
He is also the CEO and co-chairman of TWG Global, which owns a majority stake in the Cadillac F1 Team through TWG Motorsports alongside IndyCar and Formula E team Andretti Global and other motorsport entities.<\/p>\n
Companies tied to Walter are under investigation by the US government and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a wide-ranging probe that concerns four companies within his investment empire and alleged undisclosed loans between them.<\/p>\n
What does LA Lakers sale have to do with Cadillac?<\/p>\n
Walter is offloading his majority stake in the LA Lakers just 14 months after he agreed to buy the prestigious basketball franchise.<\/p>\n
The Athletic has reported that Walter’s controlling stake in the LA Lakers was valued at $12.5bn, whereas he purchased it for a reported $10bn.<\/p>\n
The move stunned the National Basketball Association as the LA Lakers was at least partially owned by Jerry Buss and his family for nearly 50 years.<\/p>\n
Now Walter’s stake has been sold to venture capitalist Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger.<\/p>\n
The ownership of Chelsea FC has now hit headlines as Walter and co-owner Todd Boehly are reportedly in talks to sell their shares in the club to majority owner Clearlake Capital.<\/p>\n
Discussions to sell Chelsea precede – but may have been accelerated by the aforementioned investigations.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg has reported that Walter is selling off his stakes to raise money to pay loans on the books of his company’s insurers amid the ongoing investigations.<\/p>\n
Attention has inevitably turned towards the Cadillac F1 team, although there are no concrete reports of a potential sale of TWG Global’s majority – and valuable – stake as yet.<\/p>\n
One of the four intermediary companies being investigated is Bradford Allen, which is developing Cadillac F1’s Indiana headquarters alongside Andretti Global’s IndyCar facilities.<\/p>\n
The investigations – which have not brought a charge – do not implicate Bradford Allen in any wrongdoing, nor has Cadillac F1 team been implicated in any way.<\/p>\n
The recent sacking of Graeme Lowdon as Cadillac F1 team principal is also circumstantial at this point – and there is no implication that General Motors’s ownership position on the F1 team has changed.<\/p>\n
Given the sale of the LA Lakers was facilitated in a reported 72 hours, the situation is fluid and rapidly changing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billionaire Mark Walter’s sale of the Los Angeles Lakers NBA franchise – announced just 14 months after purchasing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-862688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}