When Mark Walter, the Lakers controlling owner, flipped the storied team last week for $12.5 billion amid a federal probe of his businesses, it stunned the sports world but seemed to make financial and legal sense.
The Dodgers majority owner, who had bought his stake in the basketball team last year at a $10-billion valuation, likely netted a big payday from the sale to former Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger and venture capitalist Joshua Kushner.
And that’s money the billionaire can apply to pay down the debts of two troubled Delaware life insurers he owns that are under federal scrutiny.
It’s not at all clear whether the sale of the Lakers will have any effect on the ongoing investigations. Neither Walter nor his companies have been charged with any crimes.
TWG Global, Walter’s holding company, did not respond to a request for comment Friday, but a spokesperson for the company has previously stated that they are cooperating with authorities and expect the matter to be resolved “favorably.”
“Mark Walter and TWG have always acted in good faith, and those who have done business with Mark know him as honest and straightforward,” the statement said.
After receiving federal grand jury subpoenas in February, Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life and Annuity conducted internal investigations. They found that $21 billion in loans they made should have been recorded as extended to “related parties.”
Related parties have business or personal ties and transactions between them can have legitimate reasons, but they also pose potential conflicts of interest and require disclosure and typically extra regulatory scrutiny.
In the case of insurers, which hold premium dollars from policyholders for future claims payouts, regulators want to ensure the money is there when it’s needed. Related-party transactions can threaten that.
Walter, 66, chief executive of Chicago investment firm Guggenheim Partners, led a group that included another Guggenheim executive and Magic Johnson in acquiring the Dodgers for $2.15 billion in 2012. The Times has reported he tapped the insurers he owned for financing, a deal that was later vetted by state insurance regulators.
However, the amount of related-party loans made by the two affiliated life insurers now under federal scrutiny is vastly more, amounting to 40% of the invested assets of Delaware Life as of Dec. 31, according to Fitch Ratings. The credit rating outfit said that is the most of any North American life insurers it reviews.
It’s unclear exactly where all the money went, but the Wall Street Journal reported billions were passed through a third party before being received by entities tied to Walter or his TWG Global holding company.
Company executives also told Fitch that they were unaware they were making related-party loans. Bloomberg reported that investigators are looking at some loans made to multiple companies affiliated with one Chicago firm to see if they were passed along to Walter’s ventures.
In June regulatory filings that disclosed the $21 billion in restatements, each insurer labeled them as “corrections of errors,” which would imply that they were inadvertent.
Jacob Frenkel, a former U.S. attorney, said it appears clear a focus of the investigation into Walter’s businesses is to determine whether the restatements were just errors.
“If there is intentional concealment of related-party transactions or the creation of intermediaries to help with that concealment, that certainly [could] invite criminal and civil enforcement scrutiny,” said Frenkel, who prosecuted financial crimes and also worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Authorities have seized Walter’s cellphone and laptop, according to Bloomberg. Still, investigations by prosecutors and securities regulators can result in no action.
Frenkel said that if criminality is found in complex investigations such as this one, federal prosecutors will typically file mail or wire fraud charges that carry up to 20 years in prison.
It would not matter whether a company that was the victim of fraudulent conduct closed or is able to continue conducting business after being rescued financially.
“The entity’s failure is not a prerequisite for there to be a crime in intentionally misleading conduct,” he said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a parallel investigation into both companies, according to their regulatory filings.
Frenkel said its interest could revolve around how Guggenheim Investments, Walter’s asset management firm, booked revenue from its dealings with the insurers and the disclosures of the transactions.
The SEC can seek civil monetary penalties and the return of illegal profits, and bar or suspend an individual from serving as a corporate officer or director, among other remedies.
Delaware Life and Clear Spring are part of TWG’s Group 1001 Life & Annuity.
Delaware Life has started a remediation plan to restructure some of the loans, review others and address its “control deficiencies,” including through TWG purchasing some of the loans, according to ratings outfit S&P Global. It hopes to complete the plan by the end of the year.
However, Fitch in its downgrade of Delaware Life said the plan may prove “insufficient to fully address governance, reporting, and investment oversight issues.”
The Delaware Department of Insurance did not respond to emails for comment.
Rex Frazier, a former deputy commissioner at the California Department of Insurance, said that in the situation that the insurers find themselves, the state regulator will be looking at a company’s capital sufficiency.
“The change from unaffiliated to affiliated transactions can affect the regulator’s view of whether the insurers have adequate capital and, if the regulator thinks not, then the regulator can impose additional capital requirements,” said Frazier, now president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a property and casualty industry trade group.
“If the regulator determines that there is inadequate capital to pay for their obligations … there are many serious remedies they can take to protect vulnerable people depending on those income streams,” he said, including seizing a company or forcing its sale.
There is no indication that either insurer is in such dire straits. Since the disclosures, rating agencies Fitch, AM Best and S&P Global have downgraded the companies’ outlook to negative, but they also have said the insurers maintain a high level of financial strength.
Walter is not the only owner of a life insurer to rely on related-party loans to fund its business dealings.
AM Best, in a December report, said affiliated investments among life insurers and annuity companies grew more than 17% annually in 2024 to more than $373 billion, driven by those owned by private equity and asset managers.
It said the growth of such investments — a type of related-party transactions — presents “regulatory risks” that may suggest “a company’s operations are more intertwined with its parent and affiliated investment management with possible negative consequences.”
“Should the parent/affiliate company experience financial stress, negative impacts to the insurer are heightened due to the higher exposure,” it said.
Frenkel said it’s good to keep in mind that at the end of their investigations, neither the Justice Department nor the SEC may take any action.
However, due to the complexity of the case, it may be a while before that point is even reached.
“This is clearly the type of investigation that the ‘where is this going?’ conversation could easily still be continuing in January of 2028,” he said.
Aug. 12 (UPI) — The U.S. Treasury Department has officially repealed a rule that required U.S. companies and individuals to report “beneficial ownership information” to the department.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network bureau of the Treasury Department — which is meant to safeguard the U.S. financial system from illegal activity, work against money laundering and terrorism financing and help with national security — issued a final rule Tuesday that permanently removes the requirement. The reporting rule existed in connection with the Corporate Transparency Act.
The network, called FinCEN, also announced that it would delete all previously reported information from its databases.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it “a victory for common sense” and said that it eliminates a “burdensome reporting requirement.” An interim final rule has been in place since March 2025.
This final rule also exempts U.S. citizens with FinCEN identification from having to update or correct their information and eliminates a requirement for foreign businesses to report U.S. citizens who helped them register to do business in the United States.
As defined by FinCEN, a beneficial owner is one who directly or indirectly owns at least 25% of a company or exercises substantial interest over the company.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., issued a statement Tuesday saying the repeal guts the Corporate Transparency Act and is a “gift to cartels, criminals and U.S. adversaries that exploit shell companies to move millions through our financial system.”
“The Trump administration has dismissed law enforcement warnings, ignored the role that shell companies play in crimes ranging from drug trafficking to fraud to sanctions evasion and gutted a statue that Secretary Rubio once championed as ‘the most significant anti-corruption and money-laundering law in decades,” Warren said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted that statement about the act on social media in December 2020.
Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021. The reporting requirement went into effect in 2024.
A U.S. military aircraft flies over an area struck by earthquakes in La Guaira, Venezuela, on June 28, 2026. (Graphic by Truthdig; images by AP Photo, Adobe Stock)
The country that in 2008 heard then-President Hugo Chávez say, “Go to hell, damn Yankees,” as he expelled the U.S. ambassador, today watches hundreds of U.S. soldiers patrol the streets of La Guaira, which was devastated by the two earthquakes a month ago. The soldiers distribute meager humanitarian aid in small boxes bearing U.S. flag stickers while filming for publicity spots.
The U.S. has promised $386 million to help Venezuela recover, but it and its allies continue to hold more than $22 billion in frozen Venezuelan assets. Washington’s actions demonstrate, once again, that its priority is oil, not the well-being of Venezuelans. Meanwhile, U.S. real estate developers are also visiting La Guaira, treating the devastation as yet another business opportunity.
Whole areas lie in ruins in La Guaira, where 82-year old Erminia Hernández lives. She was born in La Guaira, the coastal gateway to Venezuela that hosts the country’s main airport, and where residents of nearby Caracas go to sunbathe. She says she remembers the many tragedies that have struck this area, having lived through the 1967 earthquake, the Vargas mudslide in 1999, and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, she doesn’t remember anything as devastating as the double earthquakes of June 24.
The 1967 quake stopped her as she was making majarete, a typical Caribbean dessert, she says. But last month’s earthquakes knocked her and her sister flat to the ground, face down in the hallway of their house, where she then knelt to pray as everything rocked violently. She says she does not remember who helped her stand up, but she is certain she will never forget the moment she thought she was about to die.
“The 1967 earthquake was nothing compared to this,” Hernández tells Truthdig. “And during the mudslide, I only heard about one neighbor who died. But now, every day I learn about someone I know who has died or is missing. In my immediate family alone, we lost six people, and two more are hospitalized.”
She is right. In 1967, fewer than 300 people died. After the mudslide, some sources put the death toll at 700, with thousands more missing. The coronavirus claimed 5,856 lives across the entire country over several years. But these earthquakes have killed more than 5,270 people, left 16,700 injured and 18,000 displaced. The numbers rise daily. The government puts the number of rescued at 7,000 but does not mention how many are still missing.
Jofram Gallipoli, his wife Oriana and their 4-year-old son Luciano were among those rescued. Seven floors collapsed on top of them in the Tanaguarenas neighborhood of La Guaira. They are alive today because Jofram’s father, José Alberto Gallipoli, owns a hardware store in Caracas, where he gathered crowbars, chisels, picks, a cordless drill, hacksaws and gloves so that relatives, friends, neighbors and police officers — none of them equipped with specialized rescue machinery — could dig a tunnel through the rubble.
During the 27 hours that the rescue took, Jofram Gallipoli tells Truthdig he communicated with the outside by banging an air conditioning grate with a ceramic tile every time he heard his name.
“When we were under the rubble, we thought only our building had collapsed. Coming out was a shock. We lost all our material possessions, but we are alive, and I, who have emigrated before, want to stay here this time,” Jofram Gallipoli says.
According to official figures, nearly 200 buildings collapsed entirely and at least 900 were severely damaged. Structural engineers are now conducting inspections on thousands of homes in the seven states affected by the earthquakes. For Jofram’s father, “the physical structures fell, but we, the true architects of life, are ready to rebuild, from scratch, on a stronger foundation.”
José Alberto’s words are hopeful, but how much will this reconstruction actually cost? How will we carry it out? What intentions lie behind much of the “humanitarian aid” that countries like the U.S. are sending?
Preliminary assessments from the U.N. Development Program estimate direct physical damages at $6.7 billion, a figure that focuses on housing and does not include the full extent of infrastructure damage or the cost of long-term reconstruction.
The U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, meanwhile, puts the full reconstruction cost at $37 billion: $24 billion for lost buildings — homes, schools, stores and hospitals — and $13 billion for damage to critical infrastructure such as roads and power grids. That represents nearly one-third of Venezuela’s current gross domestic product.
For now, however, the country that has promised the most economic “aid” to Venezuela is the United States, with its much-publicized $386 million.
But if the Trump administration released the Venezuelan funds it continues to block via sanctions, the country would not need these handouts: 31 tons of gold — valued at roughly $4.2 billion — remain frozen in London. The international financial system, including private banks and multilateral organizations, has blocked more than $22 billion in Venezuelan assets. At the same time, Venezuelan oil revenue is now deposited into an account at the U.S. Treasury. “We … control the dispersal of the money,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in January.
One day after the double earthquake, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License 60, which authorizes transactions related to humanitarian assistance in Venezuela but does not include the unfreezing of assets subject to sanctions or “any other transactions or activities prohibited by any other Executive Order.”
The United States acts this way because the architecture of punitive sanctions against Venezuela is the “legal foundation” for control over the Venezuelan oil industry, says William Serafino, a political scientist from the Central University of Venezuela. In 2017, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela that prohibited access to U.S. financial markets, and in 2018, expanded them to block purchasing of Venezuelan debt.
“With the issuance of licenses, Washington is able to modify certain aspects of its economic and financial coercion policy, always in the interest of U.S. companies, but without altering the overall sanctions framework,” Serafino tells Truthdig. “The sanctions are what guarantees U.S. appropriation of Venezuelan resources at a clear disadvantage to Venezuela.”
These licenses are official documents issued by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control that allow American individuals and companies, or those with U.S. ties, to carry out very specific and limited transactions with the Venezuelan state or the state oil company PDVSA.
Serafino says that such exemptions and the small amount of funds provided after the earthquakes are intended to “whitewash this illegal sanctions policy” in order to undermine the broad consensus across Venezuelan society in favor of lifting all measures that hinder the normal development of Venezuela’s economy.
The U.S. has similarly just provided $100 million in aid to Cuba, after sanctioning the country since 1962. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the sanctions violate international law — which U.N. human rights experts say could also be true of the Venezuela sanctions. U.N. human rights experts describe the latest trade tariffs that block oil from getting to Cuba as “an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion” that violates self determination.
Venezuelans aren’t the only ones rejecting the U.S. sanctions against their country. After the earthquakes, 13 prominent economists, including Isabella Weber, Jeffrey Sachs and James K. Galbraith, signed a letter calling for the lifting of sanctions. Likewise, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, warned that such coercive measures directly affect the delivery of aid and recovery plans.
“Fletcher’s statement shows that temporary exemptions are insufficient,” Serafino says, “Financial institutions, even when they theoretically have ‘permission’ from the Treasury Department to operate, are very cautious about expediting transactions related to supplies, donations and the transfer of aid funds between multilateral institutions and humanitarian organizations, due to fear of penalties and fines.”
Transactions that under normal circumstances “would take a few days,” he says, are subjected to a bureaucratic morass because of the sanctions, because “banks must constantly consult their legal departments and steer clear of red lines.”
At the same time, the United States is also using the tragedy to ramp up its military intervention in Venezuela through a “humanitarian support” operation coordinated by the U.S. Southern Command and the State Department, under the Department of Defense. That has included moving the warships USS Fort Lauderdale and USS Billings toward the coast of La Guaira, flying helicopters over devastated areas and deploying surveillance drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper.
“It is extremely serious that, taking advantage of a tragedy and under the pretext of humanitarian aid, the United States has not only taken over the country’s main airport and seaport but also deployed 900 Marines in La Guaira and 2,000 across the entire operation,” former Vice President Elias Jaua, who also held multiple Cabinet posts during the Chavez government, tells Truthdig.
“Moreover, we have seen the mapping they have done of the entire Venezuelan coastline with drones and helicopters. This is another escalation in the military occupation,” he says, adding that the deployment also imposes strict military monitoring and de facto control over Venezuela’s skies and coastline from U.S. bases in Puerto Rico, Panama and Trinidad and Tobago.
Jaua, who now works as a university professor, says the measures openly violate Article 13 of Venezuela’s Constitution, which bars foreign military bases or installations with military purposes by any country or coalition of countries in Venezuelan maritime, air and land territory.
Asked what will happen to the U.S. military presence in Venezuelan territory once the emergency ends, Jaua only comments that “a civic, political and grassroots movement must be built to defend Venezuela’s right to remain a republic. Otherwise, it will end up as a North American [i.e. U.S.] colony annexed to the United States or a protectorate administered from the north.”
Serafino, on the other hand, questions why Washington would want to flood Venezuela with Marines and other military forces when it has already managed to gain control over the country’s resources without a large and sustained presence since Jan. 3, when it launched airstrikes on the country and seized the president.
“It seems like an unnecessary and politically contentious measure, especially with U.S. midterm elections around the corner and a strong chance [President Donald] Trump could lose them,” Serafino says.
“I think the military presence will be limited to solidifying U.S. influence over oil and other strategic resources, mapping migration flows from the air and conducting permanent flyovers and naval patrols to signal to Russia and China that both Venezuela and the Caribbean Basin fall under Trump’s purview.”
But U.S. interests in Venezuela go beyond the military. Global Empowerment Mission (GEM), a company led by Miami luxury homebuilder Michael Capponi, along with other real estate developers and a network of corporate interests with ties to Trump, are already seeing the earthquakes’ devastation as a business opportunity.
While the State Department has announced that it is working with U.S. corporations including Walmart and Amazon to bolster the “humanitarian” response in Venezuela, Serafino views GEM’s presence as more important and “pervasive.” He does not rule out that Pentagon-affiliated contractors could become involved in projects to refurbish Maiquetia International Airport, the Port of La Guaira and the management of shelters.
Recent precedents such as Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion and Haiti after the 2010 earthquake saw Beltway contractors — defense, technology and consulting firms based in Washington, D.C. — securing big business opportunities. In Iraq, they obtained lucrative reconstruction contracts. In Haiti, the pattern repeated through the privatization of security, logistics management and international aid programs.
This aligns with complaints from social activists in La Guaira including José Félix Valera, who tells Truthdig that some contractors, mainly U.S. ones, are already demolishing and clearing land where people are still trying to recover the bodies of their relatives.
“There have been serious confrontations because people want to recover the bodies,” Valera says. “I saw people stop a building from being demolished, and three days later they found a young man alive. Still, the contractors with machinery take advantage of the early morning hours to demolish.”
While a desire to rebuild quickly is understandable, Valera, who apart from his activism is also a leader at community radio station Voces in La Guaira, believes other interests are at play. The demolishing is taking place at “the largest flat plots [of land] facing the Caribbean Sea in the region, and that has a lot of implications from a geopolitical standpoint but also for tourism,” he says. “For example, this is one of the best places for international events like Grand Slam tournaments or deep-sea fishing.”
“But the U.S. is also interested in the real estate possibilities,” he says.
Valera also wonders why there are so many U.S. troops in La Guaira. “Two thousand arrived, of which only 300 are rescue workers — the other 1,700 are soldiers, and at the moment they are guarding these demolition operations.”
The U.S. did not come to Venezuela alone; Israeli officials from the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command are also coordinating the supposed recovery of 14 sectors of La Guaira. In fact, they have already delivered a six-phase plan for the state’s recovery to the Venezuelan government. All of this comes despite Venezuela having broken diplomatic relations with Israel 17 years ago. Over those nearly two decades, Venezuelan officials have frequently issued harsh criticism and accusations against Tel Aviv over its genocidal actions in Palestine and the region.
Yet today, the same army that has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians since 2023 is now in Venezuela, claiming to want to help recover the bodies of our dead and rebuild our homes. Many Venezuelans are deeply distrustful and worried about what such “humanitarian aid” will mean for them in coming months.
“The future of La Guaira and the practical debate over the use of this land must involve the people of La Guaira, because this is our land and our economic livelihood,” Valera says.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.
Source: Truthdig
July 25 (UPI) — President Donald Trump‘s latest round of sweeping tariffs was hit with a lawsuit on Friday, just hours after going into effect.
Two small businesses challenged the newest levies, which apply 10% to 12.5% tariffs to more than 80 countries, justified under a provision to prevent goods made with forced labor from being imported.
The lawsuit was filed by a spice company in New York, Burlap and Barrel, and a California watch store, Collective Horology.
They are represented by the Liberty Justice Center, a legal nonprofit that won a Supreme Court case against the president’s previous round of tariffs.
Since the loss in court earlier this year, Trump has explored other legal authorities to support his tariffs and bypass congressional approval.
“Forced labor is morally indefensible, but an important objective does not give the government permission to ignore the law,” said Sara Albrecht, CEO of the Liberty Justice Center, in a statement. “The administration allowed one global tariff to expire and immediately replaced it with another under a different statute. Changing the statute doesn’t change the law. Every tariff authority has limits, and every administration must respect them.”
In the lawsuit, plaintiffs said the U.S. Trade Representative “failed to provide a reasoned, record-based explanation for its determinations.”
“This is the third time the administration has attempted to impose its global tariff policy without following the statutory limits,” said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center, in a statement.
“Section 301 is a targeted, country-specific and practice-specific remedial authority,” Schwab added. “It is not a freestanding authorization to tax substantially all imports from substantially all countries at preestablished rates.”
Hispanolistic
TD Bank Group’s (TD) merchant solutions business unit will offer the Clover commerce platform in Canada to help its clients accept payments and manage their business through a single, integrated ecosystem, the company said Monday.
The partnership between TD Bank
When Klarna chose New York over Europe for its stock market listing, it highlighted a challenge Brussels has been trying to solve for years: Europe’s fastest-growing companies often look across the Atlantic for deeper pools of capital.
As the EU seeks to build its own AI champions, strengthen its defence industry and keep more high-growth companies raising money at home, one question remains: why does a bloc with €37tn in household savings still struggle to finance its own fastest-growing businesses?
Now the European Union has stepped up efforts to reform its capital markets, aiming to make capital flow more freely across the bloc.
Policymakers are pursuing incremental reforms, including greater supervisory alignment, but a fully unified capital market is likely to take many years, as member states struggle to agree on key technical details, slowing the process.
The current speed of negotiations does not reflect the urgency being expressed by the EU’s political leadership: Europe needs more integrated capital markets to compete globally with major powers such as the US and China.
To do so, billions need to be invested in strategic sectors such as AI and defence, amid intense geopolitical uncertainty, including wars and trade tensions.
Lacking strategic industrial and technological leadership means sacrificing geopolitical power and economic resilience, especially in a global landscape where dominance, or even survival, depends on control over resources and expertise.
This narrative has been championed by leading EU politicians, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose goal of making Europe more competitive on the global stage has become the North Star of her political mandate.
For this reason, von der Leyen tasked former European Central Bank President and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi with preparing a report on EU competitiveness, which identified capital markets reform as one of its central recommendations.
Presented in autumn 2024, the report says Europe needs €750bn-€800bn in investment each year, equivalent to up to 5% of GDP, to fulfil its competitiveness goals and remain globally competitive.
“It’s ‘Do this,’ or it’s a slow agony,” Draghi warned in one of his best-known remarks. Draghi describes this “agony” as a prolonged and cumulative erosion of Europe’s economic position, driven by structural weaknesses such as high energy costs and a fragmented single market, which together make the continent less conducive to investment and innovation.
The EU is focusing on two priorities to unlock the potential of its capital markets.
The first is convincing households to invest, mobilising a small percentage of the estimated €37tn in savings. The second is integrating national financial markets across the EU to reduce barriers within the single market, making it easier for businesses to raise funding and for investors to put their money to work.
For this to happen, households need better access to capital markets, along with a better understanding of how to invest and the potential benefits involved. For example, greater participation in financial markets can help individuals build their retirement savings.
At the same time, Brussels must advance the legislative framework — known as the Savings and Investments Union (SIU) — to enable these reforms to take place.
Capital markets are marketplaces where individuals, institutions and governments buy and sell long-term financial instruments, such as equities or debt.
They offer businesses a way to raise funds and support their growth. However, scaling up in Europe remains challenging. Cross-border operations can be costly, time-consuming and involve significant administrative burdens. This is because rules differ between member states, and even where they are the same, their implementation may differ.
These are among the reasons why firms in Europe obtain most of their financing through bank credit.
“What we need to develop is a more diversified funding source,” the head of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), Verena Ross, told Euronews in an exclusive interview with Euronews Business editor Angela Barnes.
Without enough diversification, businesses look for other markets where funding is more readily available, such as the US.
“The US capital market benefits from a more consolidated supervisory approach. There are fewer layers of bureaucracy and red tape because the US uses a single currency,” Rebecca Christie, senior fellow at Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, told Euronews.
Christie also said the US benefits from having a long-established federal system and from the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant reserve currency, both of which reduce barriers and increase its attractiveness.
“Anybody who needs financing has an incentive to go to US markets because that’s where the money is,” she said.
A less fragmented European capital market would have far-reaching implications, including making more capital available for strategic investments and strengthening the euro’s international role as a global currency — another major ambition of the current EU leadership amid the dollar’s declining role.
“We live in a global world and, particularly, capital markets are global by their nature. We also need to be attractive to overseas investors, whether they are American, Asian or from wherever they come, and make sure that Europe is a destination for that investment capital,” Ross told Euronews.
Despite broad agreement that capital markets need greater integration, there is still strong disagreement over how to make it happen.
The capital markets union legislation forms part of the Savings and Investments Union (SIU), a package of legislative proposals currently under negotiation.
One of the key pieces of legislation aimed at harmonising capital markets is the Market Integration and Supervision Package, known as MISP.
Despite the intensification of talks on MISP in recent months, member states have yet to reach a common position, particularly on how to harmonise capital markets supervision.
Last spring, the six largest European economies — Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands — made a proposal setting out how to centralise supervisory powers.
In particular, they propose transferring some supervisory powers to ESMA, but there is no consensus on whether to proceed, an EU diplomat told Euronews on condition of anonymity. Even among those who agree, there are differing views on how and over what timeframe this should be implemented.
“The problem with the integration of capital markets is not even a political one; it is more a national issue,” Aurore Lalucq, chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, who played an important role in the legislation, told Euronews.
“I think there will be progress in supervision, but there are a lot of details that will be tough to negotiate due to very different perspectives,” Lalucq added, referring to the fact that member states have very different capital market cultures.
Klarna’s decision to look across the Atlantic for deeper capital markets illustrates the challenge Europe faces. While there is broad agreement that the bloc needs to mobilise more private investment, national interests continue to slow progress towards a truly unified capital market.
Han Seong-sook, minister of SMEs and startups. Photo by Asia Today
June 2 (Asia Today) — South Korean small business owners called for more practical labor consulting and measures to ease payroll burdens during a government meeting Tuesday.
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups held a roundtable on labor difficulties facing small businesses at the Korea Certified Public Labor Attorneys Association in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul.
Minister Han Seong-sook, government officials and representatives from convenience stores, restaurants and cafes attended the meeting to discuss labor management difficulties in the field.
Participants said complicated wage rules, including weekly holiday allowances and severance pay, have become a major management burden. They urged the government to provide professional consulting support.
At the meeting, the ministry announced support measures to help small businesses manage labor issues. The measures include a question-and-answer guidebook on commonly missed labor rules, regional on-site briefings and stronger online guidance through short-form videos.
The ministry also plans to help resolve disputes through counseling centers and labor lawyers. It said it will link a 24-hour artificial intelligence labor law counseling service with Small Business 24, a government support platform for small businesses.
Small business groups, however, expressed disappointment with the measures. They said expanding online and offline counseling channels could become a formality unless the government also secures enough budget and staffing to handle a surge in labor complaints.
They also said 24-hour AI counseling may have limits because labor disputes often involve complicated facts and competing interests that differ from case to case.
Participants emphasized that small businesses need more than basic information or counseling. They said the government should build a field-based consulting system and adopt policies that directly reduce labor cost pressures.
They said the government needs a bolder approach that goes beyond publicity-focused measures to address the core problems facing small businesses, including complex employment structures and allowance management.
“We will implement the measures announced today without disruption to create an environment where small business owners can run their businesses with confidence,” Han said.
The government said it will continue listening to difficulties in the field and review possible improvements to the system.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.
Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260602010000499
Some lawmakers and legal experts say the department has violated federal law with its addendum to the settlement.
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