Chelsea co-owner Mark Walter is said to be open to selling his share in the club while facing an investigation from the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office over alleged financial misdealings.<\/p>\n
According to the Wall Street Journal, Walter has shown interest in offloading his Chelsea stake as his wider business interests come under scrutiny from U.S. officials. The report follows his recent sale of NBA side the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5 billion, which was described as the largest transaction in sports history.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission are reportedly examining a potential fraud case valued at $16 billion. Loans of that scale, said to have been extended to companies connected to Walter or his conglomerate, TWG Global, are alleged to have ended up on the books of insurance companies owned by Walter. Such arrangements are meant to be treated as affiliated transactions in order to avoid conflicts of interest, though the suggestion is that no such disclosures were made.<\/p>\n
TWG pushed back strongly against the claims. \u201cMark Walter and TWG have always acted in good faith, and those who have done business with Mark know him as honest and straightforward,\u201d a TWG statement read. \u201cNothing about these transactions was any different.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group also said it is fully cooperating with the authorities. \u201cWe are confident these matters will be resolved favorably.\u201d<\/p>\n
Walter is one of Chelsea\u2019s leading investors and holds the same 12.8% stake as Wyss and Boehly, who has often been viewed as the public face of the group despite not holding a majority in BlueCo.<\/p>\n
Should Walter decide to sell, any incoming investor would still only take a minority share in Chelsea. There is also the possibility that one of the current shareholders could move to buy his stake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Walter\u2019s Chelsea stake may be sold as U.S. officials investigate alleged financial misdealings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18515,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190],"tags":[59,180,182],"class_list":["post-18516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","tag-featured","tag-player-news","tag-transfers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}