NBA commissioner Adam Silver said there were “no red flags” raised when the league vetted Mark Walter as a potential majority owner of the Los Angeles Lakers last year and said Walter’s decision to sell the Lakers to a group headed by Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger was “independent” of federal investigations into Walter’s companies.
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“I would say at the time we vetted Mark Walter to be the principal governor … we went through the full process we all do,” Silver said at a news conference following the latest Board of Governors meeting. “We spoke to governmental agencies. We spoke to, in the case of Mark Walter, a heavily regulated insurance industry. We spoke to other leagues in which he has investments, and we found no red flags.”
Walter and TWG Global, Walter’s holding company, agreed to sell the Lakers to Iger and Kushner at a $12.5 billion valuation in August, just 14 months after purchasing the Lakers from the Buss family for a then-record $10 billion valuation. Walter was already a minority owner in the Lakers.
Two of Walter’s companies — Delaware Life Insurance Company and its affiliate Clear Spring Life and Annuity — received grand jury subpoenas in February as part of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Delaware Life acknowledged in a March regulatory filing. A parallel investigation is underway by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the filing noted.
Life insurers typically invest in relatively safe and low-risk assets to provide predictable returns, and insurers are required to report transactions with affiliated businesses to regulators as a safeguard to protect policyholders and guard against conflicts of interest. Delaware Life said investigators are examining whether investments tied to affiliated businesses had been improperly reported as unaffiliated.
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With Walter at the center of multiple investigations from governmental agencies, some have questioned whether the NBA should have allowed him to purchase the Lakers in the first place, but Silver defended the league’s protocols for vetting potential owners and ownership groups.
“We take the vetting process very seriously,” Silver said Tuesday. “A lot of what we do is intensive database searching. I mean, you would think in this day and age, with AI and everything else, that everything is centralized. It’s not.
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“In many cases, you’re going state-by-state. In certain cases, people are part of industries that are regulated state-by-state, so you have to look there as well. We also talk to as many people as we can find who have knowledge about these people, and we do interviews. … So, again, we’re always seeing if we can do things better, but I don’t see a trend or some widespread issue, certainly among our principal owners, that gives me cause for concern.”
Five members of the Buss family want to sell their remaining stake in the Lakers, but Lakers governor Jeanie Buss has petitioned a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to block the sale.
Walter also has an ownership stake in MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, the Premier League’s Chelsea FC, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, the Professional Women’s Hockey League, Cadillac F1 and the Billie Jean King Cup.
— Alex Andrejev, Melody Gutierrez and Rebecca Tauber contributed to this story.