Mark Walter decided to sell the LA Lakers for a record $12.5 billion. Less than 14 months after buying a controlling stake in the franchise for $10 billion. A financial commentator has connected it to the federal investigation currently surrounding his business empire.

Joe Pompliano wrote on X shortly after the sale to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger was reported.

“Bloomberg is reporting that Mark Walter has been in talks with investors to raise money to pay down the loans he is being investigated for,” Pompliano wrote. That’s why he sold the Lakers for $12.5B — in a deal that came together in just 72 hours — less than two years after he purchased the team.”

He followed up with. “I wouldn’t say I am a conspiracy theorist, but it does seem weird that a guy who owns multiple sports teams and was in the middle of rebuilding the Lakers’ entire business operation would sell the team for a 20% gain in 2 years at the same time he is being investigated for fraud.”

Mark Walter, CEO of TWG Global, has been under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the SEC. It is over roughly $16 billion in loans made by insurance companies he controls, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

The probe centers on Guggenheim Partners, the Chicago investment firm Walter leads, along with two Delaware-based life insurers he owns, Delaware Life Insurance and Clear Spring Life and Annuity. Investigators are examining whether related-party transactions involving those companies’ private credit holdings, some of which reportedly helped finance Walter’s own purchase of the Dodgers, were properly disclosed to insurance regulators, and whether the activity constituted fraud.

The investigation escalated notably over the past year. FBI agents executed a search warrant last September aboard a private plane at a Chicago airport, seizing Walter’s phone and laptop, a detail that only became public in late July. Delaware Life and Clear Spring both received grand jury subpoenas in February, and the companies have since conducted internal reviews, correcting a previous assertion that $1.4 billion of their investments involved entities connected to Walter’s other businesses.

A TWG spokesperson pushed back on any suggestion of wrongdoing in a statement to the Wall Street Journal: “Mark Walter and TWG have always acted in good faith, and those who have done business with Mark know him as honest and straightforward. Nothing about these transactions was any different.” Walter has not been charged with any crime.

The Lakers sale does not currently affect Walter’s ownership of the Dodgers, Chelsea FC, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, the PWHL, or Cadillac’s Formula 1 team, all of which remain under his control through TWG Global. There is no public indication Walter is considering selling any of those other assets, and Sportico’s own reporting on the situation noted explicitly that nothing currently ties the Lakers sale directly to the federal probe beyond the coincidental timing.