Gomez sounded the alarm about Paramount’s Gulf funding earlier this year, warning of potential influence from “foreign governments with documented records of press suppression.\u201d She pointed in particular Saudi\u2019s Public Investment Fund controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who U.S. intelligence previously found ordered the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Gomez noted she had called for a full Commission vote \u2014 but that the FCC had instead \u201csnuck this ruling out as a staff-level decision” with \u201cno accountability for a call of this magnitude.\u201d She indicated she would share more soon.<\/p>\n
A handful of lawmakers have also scrutinized the sovereign funds\u2019 involvement in recent months, including Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Maria Cantwell \u2014 among those who wrote a May letter to FCC chairman Brendan Carr to raise \u201cserious concerns” as well.<\/p>\n
Carr, who was appointed by Republican President Donald Trump, had been broadly supportive of the Paramount-Warner tie-up since it was announced. In March, he told CNBC that the FCC\u2019s regulatory role, if any, would be minimal \u2014 but that he thought it was a \u201cgood deal\u201d that should get through \u201cpretty quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if the company hadn’t received the FCC\u2019s sign off for the Gulf funds’ equity stakes, the Warner merger wouldn\u2019t necessarily be knocked of the table (the Ellisons and RedBird might just be on the hook for more money). But the funding still secures a sizeable cash infusion for the deal \u2014 which, including billions of dollars in debt, is currently valued at nearly $111 billion based on outstanding shares.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gomez sounded the alarm about Paramount’s Gulf funding earlier this year, warning of potential influence from “foreign governments…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-468735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}