[Pablo Torre] Steve Balmer paid Kawhi Leonard under the table to avoid salary cap

Once again I recommend everyone listen to this & the preceding 3 episodes,

it is oh so much worse to hear Pablo play a clip of an incredulous Mark Cuban saying "look, this is all BS if this was really fraudulent they'd have done this - I am super DEAL GUY trust me I know these things"

And then see/hear Pablo unveil a document or documents or interviews that shows the Clippers doing exactly that thing.

The part about the deposition today of the Aspiration owner - taking the 5th(!) - w/r/t to the Clippers deal was just a chef's kiss

I guess Balmer thinks since we're in an Oligarchy now he can just lie & bribe his way out of it. We'll see.

But holy ****, pre 2016/24 id have said these guys should plead guilty and hope for life with no parole. They are cooked as hell in an even superficially just environment.

Last thing I'm wondering - I'm not a bankruptcy guy, but doesn't the Clippers injecting money into an insolvent, circling the drain company to be transferred to No Show Kawhi LLC open Kawhi up to be pursued by the Trustee or other Creditors? Can't they The Claw some of that back?

Need a @MadMax or someone who knows something about bk law here.

 

The brazenness of this scheme in terms of its complexity combined with the weirdness/laziness of Kawhi & his team really sets this apart.

All Kawhi frankly had to do was literally make a post or 2, like this one! Or click a " like" button, or whatever, and he'd have some defense here.

But no, the point for KL2 Aspire LLC was to have a literal no show job and do nothing at all. It will cost them, hopefully.

 

The other owners in the league here have an incentive though

For example the Celtics just broke up their own super team due to 2nd Apron concerns. Joe Lacob basically broke up the Warriors after very loudly complaining how much tax he was paying.

I suspect/hope there is genuine anger on the part of the league that they abided by the rules more or less when Ballmer appears to have put together a $100 million scheme designed to explicitly break them.

This isn't a sweetheart endorsement deal it's an actual scheme designed to conceal, that puts it way over the edge of *wink wink nudge nudge * territory IMO.

 

The verdict looks like it is in. The NBA is now on the clock. They should come down hard because they have nothing to lose like if it were the Lakers or Shohei. No real reason to push it under the rug.

 

You have way more faith in the integrity of the NBA product than I do.

 

Has nothing to do with faith in the integrity of the product -

NBA owners take the salary cap pretty seriously because you're coming between a billionaire and having to give more money to (mostly black) laborers - read the news, they hate that!

 

I get what you’re saying and, as a black man, I agree. NBA players get scraps compared to the level of revenue they generate.

I can prove it but I suspect this Clippers/ Kawhi thing is just the tip of the iceberg and if the NBA REALLY started digging they’d find so much worse. That’s why I don’t think they’ll be much digging. Balmer will get a pee pee slap, Clippers lose some draft picks and Kawhi gets fined and the NBA buries this. They’ve buried worse in the past.

 

I think the difference is that Ballmer is in a different stratosphere than other NBA owners - he could buy & sell Tillman & his 3 superyachts and not even notice the difference in his checking account.

I don't doubt some NBA owners wish they too could elaborately cheat like him but I think the majority is threatened by it

 

Fair enough

 

I enjoy these podcast and really appreciate the documents Pablo shares. It’s a cool puzzle.

However, I don’t think this podcast added to Pablo’s case, aside from continuing to make fun of Cuban (which I’ve been following on X), I think it weakened his case.

Do you want to play a game? Keep it fun. You play Pablo, and I’ll be one of his guests who he asks to play devil’s advocate. I’ll ask you questions about the info in this latest podcast, that imo were screaming to be asked.

 

David and Goliath situation.

The documents and witness accounts on Pablo's podcasts are stuff they have collaborated and vetted. Thing ran through with their lawyer to the best of their ability. They are keenly aware not try cross a line of defamation, as that could trigger Balmer to send lawyers after them.

What Pablo is allowed to say and present, is very different than Cuban's what-if-ism that comes to Cuban's mind. Cuban's 'if I did it, I would do A B C....'

Mark and Pablo are having a dialogue. It's easy for Mark to point out other avenues, instead of actually doing the work and going through the documents.

Was listening to one of the Boston journalist who also had access to the ex-employees. He basically said: 'Trust that there are things that are either off-the-record or have not been vetted yet, that's not being mentioned on the show.'. There is a journalistic filter.

That said, he basically said: the stuff he heard off-the-record is that yea.... Clippers was definitely circumventing.

 

I'm taking it on faith that prepaying for carbon credits for non-existent emissions is non standard practice - but in any event - but the Aspire CEO guy taking the 5th over the Kawhi Endorsement is - devastating IMO.

That you would consider the Kawhi deal to be so incriminating that you won't testify to its very existence because you fear its very existence may actually be *criminal* in nature is a massively bad thing for the Clippers

 

I didn’t ask a question yet, and you’re already defending Pablo’s interpretation. Do you not want to field questions? It’s just a fun exercise like Pablo did in podcast 1 and 2: he encouraged his guests to play devil’s advocate.

for the record: I would be pleased if he does find a Joe Smith quality smoking gun … bc I want Kawhi’s contract voided. But in the meantime, it’s a puzzle … do you want to play?

 

Thinks for sharing this. What’s the timing of this, before or after Pablo’s latest podcast #3. And do you have a link?

 

I’m surprised it took this long. If the NBA allows owners to invest in companies that sponsor their teams, and players are allowed to be partners/employees of those companies, then the NBA knew this was going on from the start. That’s the first glaring loophole in this fiasco and there is no way it went unnoticed by the NBA legal department.

 

What's the unasked question? Full disclosure I don't have any prior non-vague knowledge of how carbon credits are supposed to work, other than than the industry has had some trouble with greenwashing and the whole science behind carbon offsets being kind of BS.

 

Not my area of the law...but I did subscribe to Pablo's podcast yesterday based on your posts here. (I'm also planning a stay at a Holiday Inn Express)

 

There are many things in the latest Podcast, as well as the first that were weak and begging for follow-up questions.

So, in my Pablo role as devil’s advocate, the biggest question (of many) that wasn’t asked in Podcast 3 was why would Ballmer (at $116m total) give Sanberg four times more money than was necessary to pay off Kawhi $28m.

As for Carbon Credit projects in April and June of ‘22, to put this in perspective … the Boston Red Sox signed their carbon credit deal in March 2022, (which we know was at least $5m, per bankruptcy, likely more.) Qatar (a merger PIPE investor in InterPrivate/Aspriation merger) also bought a project in April ‘22, while they were making their big Carbon Neutral FIFA World Cup announcements. In Oct ‘22 the Ballmer Group (philanthropists) started a climate change foundation with initial donation of $217m for projects such as lowering carbon emission via trees. This effort is not a one off, the foundation is now over $1b in grants making Ballmer top 10 climate change foundations in the USA.

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I thought you did bankruptcy, I swear i read you say that once. I am getting old I guess.

Without going back and listening to the whole thing, my recollection is that the implication was that the Ballmer-Clippers cash infusions weren't so much a series of money laundering like-for-like transactions that are meant to zero out the No-show contract with KL2 Aspire LLC,, but rather were made because the company had a cash flow crisis and a few extra tens of millions for Ballmer is chump change.

For example, if as Mark Cuban alleges, that it was *not* standard to not prepay for carbon credits and carbon credit brokerage, those Boston Red Sox and Qatar deals may have resulted in $0 actually flowing into the company (I don't know any of this).

The creditor list *may* back this up.

Look at the top entries (the Clippers and the Forum, formerly home of the Lakers, lol) - they are listed as being owed Contracted Carbon Credits.

(edit, looking at it again, there's apparently multiple categories of "Carbon creditors" - Contracted Carbon Credits (the Clippers, the Forum (owned by Ballmer now I guess?) and also "Prepaid Carbon Credits" (Deloitte, BoA) and "Future Carbon Credits"

Now - skip past KL2 Aspire LLC (the front company for the *literal no show job*) and look at the Red Sox, who are listed as Unsecure Trade Payable claimants, which, as I understand it is a vendor designation and implies that no contracted carbon credits are owed (unlike the clippers, who paid in advance, allegedly)

Not sure about the Ballmer family foundation, I guess my question to you back is, why can't it simultaneously be true that Ballmer cares about climate change with sincerity but also used Aspire to launder an extra payment to Kawhi via an honest-to-goodness no-show contract? I don't find these two things to be inconsistent at all.

 

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Hard to get one on this topic. If it helps, someone posted Pablo’s timeline on previous page.

the two points you make above lead into my next question. But first I want to explain the Red Sox and Qatar deals right around the time of Ballmer’s additional 2022 cash infusion via bogus credits that Cuban suggested. Red Sox paid a portion of every ticket sold into an Aspiration Fund to buy credits offsetting the carbon footprint of fans, for the 2022 season (and beyond). So that would be a cash infusion. It was announced as a 7 figure payment over time.

Qatar was just a consulting gig, which reads much like what my company did. So, that should be cash, too.

I only mention these, because the podcast comes off making it sound like there was no revenue coming in.

To your two points that I quoted above, yes, I totally agree that both honest stuff by Ballmer and a nefarious scheme can happen. But the honest stuff isn’t good to mention to Pablo, he gets defensive on X about anything that weakens his reporting.

Next question: In the deposition, that is USB Assessment Management going after their $145m loan. They are huge. They also invested in two rounds of Aspiration funding, actually leading the Series C-3, as I recall. Clearly it would help their case to know about other deals Sanberg was making while defaulting on the loan. If they ask Sandberg to reveal his other deals in the Commercial Contract Division of NYC, and Ballmer (as you say) had other intentions for his Carbon Credits infusion beyond paying Kawhi, why wouldn’t Sanberg plead 5th to hide Ballmer’s money from the fact he wasn’t paying USB.​

Why couldn’t USB have found out about the $50m credit deals with Ballmer and, using Cubans’s simple logic, wanted this on record, so they could pursue more questions (like, can you prove you bought any credits?) regarding whether Ballmer was trying to help them pay off the loan ,,, to a fellow merger investor, no less. Why would USB care about about Aspirstion’s contract obligations to someone else, when they are suing to get paid, and Ballmer’s carbon credit deals is revenue in and sketchy to them.​

but that question to Pablo would weaken his suggestion that pleading the 5th was solely about Kawhi.

btw: I’m also getting my hands on that deposition tomorrow. I’ll be looking for any other times he pleaded the 5th. Was it solely Ballmer deals?