One thing to get you started: Shares in Tingo Group more than halved on Tuesday after Hindenburg Research, a shorting firm, said it had placed a bet against the Nasdaq-listed financial technology group whose chief executive made an unsuccessful bid for Sheffield United football club.
In today’s newsletter:
The three billion dollar reasons for a sudden peace in golf
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund She has appeared frequently on DD for her role in some of the wildest moments in business and finance over the past few years. Who could forget Elon MuskThe “finance secured” tweet in 2018 or the amazing wrong bets on it Softbank vision box?
while Masayoshi sonHer handbag didn’t pan out, Saudi Arabia has made serious progress in dominating the world’s most popular sport.
The most recent example came on Tuesday when it backed the Public Investment Fund Leaf golf and the PGA Tour They said they would merge and become partners, ending a year-long battle between the two golf champions that had been mired in litigation and confusion.
The Saudi-backed LIV burst onto the golf scene last year, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to attract top golfers such as brooks kupkaAnd elephant Michelson And Dustin Johnson to join the breakaway league. It threatened the PGA’s dominance of golf and put industry bigwigs on the defensive.
But the PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan And Yasser Al-Rumayyanthe head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, recently began pitching a private resolution among their organizations about golf tours and meals in Venice, they told DD.
Crucial to the truce is an increasingly popular asset that Saudi Arabia uses in the world of sports: cash.
PIF is set to pour billions of dollars into the combined PGA and LIV, which has yet to be given a new name.
Some of the people involved in the leak, which some of the people involved said could amount to around $3 billion, assert how Saudi Arabia got into global sports using oil-funded government finances.
Another breach occurred in Saudi Arabia last month when Newcastle Unitedthe English Premier League soccer team that got it in 2021, qualified to win the lucrative prize Champions League a race.
Her ambition in sports does not stop there. The Saudi government earlier this week transferred majority holdings in four Saudi football teams to the Public Investment Fund, a gambit many believe is aimed at creating a domestic league with resources to attract top footballers such as Karim Benzema And Lionel Messi.
Some notable figures on Wall Street helped broker an unimaginable truce in golf.
investment banker Michael Klein British business personality Amanda Staveley Representing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, while Jimmy denFounder and Managing Partner of Sandler O’Neil + AssociatesAnd Ed Herlihyco-chair of Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen, and KatzPGA advised.
“We have been competing for the past two years. . . I think it’s fair to say we never imagined we’d get to this point.
But the fact that Saudi Arabia was victorious underscores the advantage of betting that money will eventually win in the world of sports.
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Untie the Conscious Sequoia
The most successful venture capital marriage is coming to an end.
Sequoiaa Silicon Valley group that made its name by making early bets on appleAnd Google And Airbnbhas spent the past two decades glossing over the vast profits from its business in China.
That union is now over, with Sequoia announcing on Tuesday that it is splitting its China business and ending complex profit-sharing arrangements between partners in the various entities.
Sequoia says the breakup – which also saw the company’s businesses in India and Southeast Asia fade – makes business sense. But it also comes against an increasingly bleak geopolitical backdrop, with tensions rising between Beijing and Washington in particular over technology.
“It is becoming increasingly complex to run a decentralized global investment business,” the group heads in the US, China and India wrote in a letter to their limited partners.
The separation would end a long-standing profit-sharing arrangement, by which partners in each entity shared globally the spoils of successful companies in other countries. China sequoialed by a billionaire Neil Shanewon a lot of bets on Chinese tech giants such as Tik Tok parents Byte DanceAnd JD.com And Ali Baba.
This setup was both a hedge against local downturn and a way to share the gains, though the partners are ultimately rewarded according to the success of the investments made in their own backyards.
But with the United States and China engaged in a technology arms race, sharing profits from overseas investments is a more complicated business. In the United States, Sequoia Capital is an investor in chat originator Open AI; In China, Sequoia Capital China He is a major investor in domestic artificial intelligence companies.
And with cross-border investment in technology under more intense scrutiny, the strategy that allowed Sequoia to make handsome gains from the technology arms race between the world’s two largest economies has come to resemble walking a tightrope.
The company insists that this divorce is more like a conscious disengagement, in which the participants celebrate each other’s independence. But after 20 close and profitable years, both parties could be forgiven for looking over their shoulders wistfully.
The tire acquisition is testing Italy’s relations with Beijing
pirelliThe 150-year-old Prada from Milan is every bit as Italian as the rubber-spinning Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis.
So when the tire swivel Marco Tronchetti Provera Pirelli sold to Chem China In a $7.7 billion acquisition in 2015, politicians and investors worried whether its technology would be intercepted by its Chinese parent company.
At the time, Tronchetti Provera said this was a hullabaloo. He felt that the sale would help him retain control of the business.
But the Italian king of tires is now suffering from seller’s remorse, the Financial Times’ Silvia Sciorelli Borelli, Amy Kazmin and Yuan Yang report, as tensions rise between Pirelli’s Italian and Chinese shareholders.
The changing geopolitical climate could help in the case of Tronchetti Provera: Prime Minister Georgia Meloni She has taken a tougher stance on China than her predecessors. Its new government is reconsidering Pirelli’s future under rules that allow it to scrutinize foreign investments in strategic assets.
But before the Italian government tried to restrict ChemChina’s parents Sinocheminfluence By limiting its voting rights or forcing it to reduce its 37 percent stake, it must prove that Tiremaker technology (including microchips to broadcast information about tire usage and potential geolocation data) has national security implications.
Experts and some Italian officials say this is exaggerated. But people close to the talks between Pirelli, Sinochem and Roma say the Communist Party’s meddling in the company’s management is the bigger issue.
Documents submitted to the hearing and seen by the Financial Times show that the Chinese government has sought more control over business and governance decisions.
With relations between Rome and Beijing already strained, Meloni could open a can of worms if she uses the set of frames to clamp down on investment from China, Lakes notes.
job moves
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Morgan StanleyGlobal Head of Mergers & Acquisitions Rob Kindler Returns to the law after 17 years in the American Bank. Kindler will join Paul Weiss As a Corporate Partner and Global Head of Mergers & Acquisitions in New York from September. He previously spent 20 years in a law firm Cravath before joining c. B. Morgan Chase in 2000.
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The National Bank of Paris Paribas He hired a senior banker at JPMorgan Jacqueline Taylor It was reported by Financial News as the managing director of its UK coverage team.
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Slaughter and Mai Partner in the company Himita Somanasurya He was loaned to the UK acquisition panel for two years as secretary.
Smart readings
Bad bets Merger and arbitrage traders have met their match in antitrust watchdog Lena Khan as she ramps up her aggressive campaign against some of America’s most powerful companies, Bloomberg reports.
Agent Awards FT Alphaville has handed out awards to the best corporate franchisees out there.
Gambling company Georgia Meloni Italy’s prime minister has thrust herself into some of the country’s most complex financial deals in a strategy that could make or break her legacy, Bloomberg reports.
News Tour
Lloyd’s threatens to put Telegraph owner into receivership (FT)
CBI wins vote of confidence after allegations of misconduct (FT)
The court upheld Musk’s victory in a $13 billion lawsuit over the Tesla-SolarCity deal (Reuters)
Warner Bros. Discovery boss turns to longtime confidante to save wounded CNN (FT)
Italian Eni enters into exclusive talks to acquire Neptune Energy (Reuters)
US prosecutors said Unaoil founder negotiated bribes (Financial Times)
Blackstone Agrees to Sell San Antonio Resort Hotel for $800 Million (WSJ)
