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Los Angeles officials are expressing growing fears that taxpayers and the city treasury could be hit with a round of crippling costs to support the 2028 Olympic Games if the city doesn’t ink a rigorous deal to assure a “zero–cost” Games.

Some city officials have long been concerned that taxpayers could be left with massive bills if the Olympics don’t generate the income organizers have promised. Delays in finalizing a deal between City Hall and the Olympics committee have heightened those tensions.

The exact costs to L.A. and other local governments remain unknown, as officials wait to hear from LA28 and federal security agencies about exactly what services they will need. Recent controversy over the ties between Casey Wasserman, the head of the L.A. Olympics, and Jeffrey Epstein have added to the uncertainty over the finances in the minds of some city leaders.

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto and Councilmember Monica Rodriguez both issued letters demanding a contract pledging that LA28 cover any of the city’s future costs that arise as the city plays host to hundreds of thousands of athletes and fans.

The contract, more than six months overdue, is needed “to foreclose any scenario in which funds might go back to the wealthy backers and investors of the LA 28 organization without reimbursing taxpayer funded extraordinary costs,” the city attorney wrote to council members.

Rodriguez agreed in a separate letter this week that the city needs a contract that assures that the Olympics organization will pay any excess costs for policing, transportation, trash pickup and more, so that taxpayers are not burdened or “core city services” slashed.

That should take priority over the private nonprofit LA28 building a “Legacy Fund” to bankroll future youth sports programs, public sports facilities and the like, argued the city officials, who are both up for reelection this year.

“Bankruptcy cannot be the legacy of these Games,” Rodriguez wrote, without elaborating on what she meant, though L.A.’s top budget official recently projected a deficit, unconnected to the Olympics, of “several hundred million” dollars.

LA28 officials responded with a statement they issued previously, saying, in part, that “LA28 remains committed to delivering the safest, most secure, and fiscally responsible Games that will benefit Angelenos for decades to come,” adding, “We remain engaged in good faith negotiations and look forward to our continued partnership with the City of Los Angeles.”

LA28 Chief Executive Reynold Hoover said at a press event Wednesday that ticket sales were one vehicle for the host committee to assure that taxpayers didn’t get stuck with a big bill down the road.

The stakes remain high for both sides. The private LA28 group needs the city’s police, fire, sanitation, streets and transportation services to deliver a successful event. The city wants the sports extravaganza to succeed, not only to burnish its image on an international stage, but also to assure there is enough money to pay for all the extra tasks city workers will perform.

The LA28 leaders project the Games will cost more than $7.1 billion. They say that money will come from a variety of sources: nearly $1 billion from the International Olympic Committee, $437 million from international marketing rights, $2.5 billion from corporate sponsors in the U.S., $2.5 billion from ticket sales and hospitality packages, $344 million from licensing and merchandise and $405 million in other revenue.

LA28 reports being ahead of schedule on the revenue front. But city officials worry that unforeseen events — including an economic downturn or natural disaster — could blow up the income model, with one of many wild cards being the willingness of President Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to follow through with a funding pledge to the Democratic-controlled city.

L.A. officials have long expressed concern that Trump and Congress might belatedly yank away $1 billion already set aside to reimburse state and local governments for security, planning and other Olympics-related costs.

While the two elected officials and some others, including an attorney representing city employees, raised alarms, an individual with knowledge of the talks between the city and LA28 said that a tentative agreement would likely be before the City Council “within two or three weeks.”

The knowledgeable individual, who asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the discussion, said negotiators on both sides must bear in mind how a third party, the federal government under Trump, is integral to the financing model.

The source tracking the negotiations said that both sides needed to make sure the pact creates a path to “maximize federal resources, which were dedicated by Congress for the Games,” adding: “The contract needs to avoid saying that LA28 is going to pay, for example, for all of the LAPD’s extra costs in such a way that the federal government says, ‘Fine, then you don’t get any of the federal money.’ We can’t afford to leave a billion dollars on the table.“

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, one of those bargaining for the city, struck a positive note.

“We are invested in a successful Olympics. The organizing committee knows that it needs the city and city services to have a successful Games,” said Szabo. “It’s in both the city’s and the organizing committee’s best interest to have a successful Games. We’re joined at the hip and we’ll succeed together, or not.”

The 2028 Games have been designated a National Special Security Event, placing it in the same category as major party political conventions and Super Bowls. The U.S. Secret Service sets the security plan for those events.

Officials in L.A. have said they are still waiting to learn from the Secret Service how broad the security “blast area” should be around each athletic venue. The federal agency will then dictate how many police and federal agents will flood those zones, which include the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Exposition Park and Crypto.com Arena.

Attorney Connie Rice, who represents L.A. city employees concerned about how the city will pay for the Games, said that her clients still had questions. Rice, whose past litigation helped force LAPD reforms, said that employees helping to plan for security said they had estimated that the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, alone, would need at least $1 billion to pay for extra security during the Games.

The current federal allocation would not get the city and county of Los Angeles $1 billion since many other jurisdictions, including Long Beach, Oklahoma City and the state of California also will be competing for U.S. funding. And the federal government has not yet released its “notice of funding opportunity” — laying out the parameters for claiming a part of the $1 billion.

Rice argued that the city gave up its best leverage when it signed an earlier agreement to host the Games. “Who is going to pay the bill, or who are they even going to send the invoices to, when the Games are over and LA28 is dissolved?” Rice asked. “LA28 has no obligation to raise money once the event is over.”

Los Angeles city officials expect to have requests by October from LA28 for the services the Games organization needs at each venue. The Games organizing group has agreed to pay any costs that exceed the city’s typical expenditures. But there is not a clear understanding of what constitutes a customary level of service. The massive event is expected to require an array of services, including trash pickup, bus service, street closures, park maintenance, drinking water stations and building inspections of temporary Olympic structures.

In her letter late last month to City Council members, the city attorney raised a slew of questions about the fiscal contract with LA28. Feldstein Soto contended the Games had a “heightened risk exposure … given the recent claims against LA 28 Chairman Casey Wasserman.”

Wasserman’s name appeared in the files about convicted sexual predator Epstein, with records showing the then-28-year-old sports marketer had gone on a two-week tour of Africa sponsored by Epstein and later exchanged risque emails with Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Though some activists demanded Wasserman leave his post as LA28 chair and called for a Games boycott, there has been no apparent reduction in sponsorships or ticket sales because of the furor.

As city attorney, Feldstein Soto is advising the city officials negotiating the Olympic contract. Her letter says she will insist that “transparent audit rights and procedures” be put into place to assure the city treasury does not take a hit in supporting the Games.

The letter raises the possibility that natural disasters or other emergencies could cut into LA28’s bottom line. It also asks: “What happens if the federal government does not pay the assume $1 billion [or] … [w]hat happens if the city’s actual expenses exceed $1 billion?” Feldstein Soto’s answer: “In either situation, this office believes that all surplus funds must reimburse the city and its taxpayers first, as promised, before any surplus funds are available for a [LA28] legacy or tribute fund.”

Congratulations to all the young athletes and their teams on The Times All-Area high school basketball teams. I do wonder about the choices the seniors are making in their commitments to colleges and I look to The Times to explain why UCLA is seemingly not on the radar for these young players.

It used to be known that the Bruins’ academic requirements were a significant barrier to many high school players. Is that still true? Are the local graduates not the cream of the crop that Southern California was known for in past years? Are NIL deals affecting the choices of these future freshmen? Is UCLA not making a strong outreach effort for the top local talent? Is L.A. so awful for these kids that it isn’t even on their radar to stay close to home?

I am sure I am not alone in seeking clarity around the issue of the exodus of local talent to Missouri, Oregon State, Texas, North Carolina, Nevada, and even more confounding, USC.

David Gerne Echt
Torrance

The Los Angeles Times welcomes expressions of all views. Letters should be brief and become the property of The Times. They may be edited and republished in any format. Each must include a valid mailing address and telephone number. Pseudonyms will not be used.

Email: sports@latimes.com

REDDING — At a Board of Supervisors meeting in rural Shasta County last month, Clint Curtis dropped a bombshell: A sheriff way down in Riverside was going to confiscate all the ballots from a recent election.

Curtis, the county registrar of voters, was the first to announce the planned ballot seizure. Even the sheriff himself, Chad Bianco, had not publicly revealed his intentions.

Later, as Bianco’s move grabbed headlines — he is a leading Republican candidate for governor — Curtis’ behind-the-scenes maneuvering remained largely unknown. The registrar had worked with the Riverside County citizens group whose fraud allegations had sparked Bianco’s investigation, even traveling 600 miles south to speak on their behalf.

Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis poses last month in the new election observation room at the elections office in Redding.

In his short time in Shasta County, Curtis, whose claims about rigged voting machines stretch back to the early 2000s, has solidified his position as a torchbearer of the election denialism movement, vowing to take his message about untrustworthy machines and potential fraud across California and beyond.

Critics here say he has steadily disenfranchised voters. He has eliminated nine of the vast county’s 13 ballot drop boxes, telling The Times he did not trust ballots in the hands of “little old ladies running all over” to collect them. And he has advocated for a local ballot initiative that would limit elections to one day, eliminate most voting by mail and require voter ID as well as a hand count of ballots.

Curtis also has accused his predecessors in the registrar’s office, without evidence, of election fraud and has called for federal authorities to raid the office he now runs.

“Do I think ballots were stuffed? Yes. Have I contacted the DOJ? Yes,” Curtis said at the Feb. 24 Shasta County supervisors’ meeting just before announcing Bianco’s planned ballot seizure.

Curtis, a 67-year-old attorney, was appointed by the Shasta County supervisors last April. He lived in Florida then, had no previous ties to the area and had never run an election.

He got the job based largely on two stated qualifications: He wanted to hand-count votes. And he had worked with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist.

In his public job interview, Curtis promised to grill local elections staffers to “find out what they know.”

Now Curtis is running for election himself, trying to keep his job in this Northern California county where a majority of the supervisors were so swept up in President Trump’s discredited election fraud claims that they ditched their Dominion voting machines in 2023 and opted to hand-count ballots (quickly prompting a new state law that banned them from doing so).

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Curtis says he is running to make elections more transparent by questioning the status quo and hanging cameras everywhere to capture election workers’ every move.

“Republicans love me,” Curtis told The Times. “The Democrats are pretty good. And then I have these crazy socialist people that just hate me.”

Beliefs aside, Curtis has quickly become a colorful local character.

He took a lie detector test to attest that he didn’t rig the November election. He chose as his number two a heavy metal guitarist from San Francisco — stage name “Turmoil” — who is a progressive Democrat.

And last September, surveillance cameras captured him pushing an antique metal safe through the Shasta County elections office on a Saturday while his wife assisted with a pulling harness. Curtis wore blue jeans — and no shirt.

He said he moved the safe, which contained odds and ends, on a hot day to make more room for election observers.

Curtis first gained national attention for election skepticism in December 2004, in testimony before Congress.

He had been working as a computer programmer in Florida and was brought in as an expert witness by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who were reeling over President George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry a few weeks earlier and furious about an error with an electronic voting machine that gave Bush extra votes in Ohio.

Curtis claimed that he had written “a prototype” of software that would allow cheaters to alter votes using “invisible buttons” on touch-screen balloting machines. His claims were largely dismissed. But he continues to tout his congressional testimony to cast himself as an expert on election malfeasance.

A woman passes by a “Greetings From Redding” mural on Feb. 25.

After testifying, he unsuccessfully ran for office multiple times in Florida. He refused to concede after one loss, alleging the machines were rigged.

In Shasta County, he saw a chance for redemption.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Board of Supervisors gained a hard-right majority supported by anti-vaxxers, secessionists, members of a local militia and pro-Trump election deniers.

In 2022, someone hung a trail camera — the kind hunters use to track wildlife — behind the elections office to monitor the staff. Some observers yelled at staffers and got in the face of Cathy Darling Allen, the longtime registrar, who installed a 7-foot metal fence to keep them at bay.

Joanna Francescut, who worked in the elections office for 17 years, is running to be county registrar.

Darling Allen clashed with the supervisors as they pushed to hand-count votes, a process she argued would be slow, expensive and prone to error. She retired in 2024, citing health reasons.

Her successor resigned after less than a year. The supervisors appointed Curtis in a 3-2 vote, passing over Joanna Francescut, who had worked in the elections office since 2008 and was Darling Allen’s number two.

Days later, Curtis fired Francescut. She is now running against him in the June 2 election.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, called Curtis a “nationally known conspiracy theorist.”

“I can’t imagine bringing in someone who is neither an election administrator nor a Californian for a job like that and basically chasing out experienced election officials whose work had withstood scrutiny for decades,” Becker said. “The voters of Shasta County, unfortunately, are paying the price.”

Curtis has accused Francescut and other elections staffers of stuffing ballots to sabotage conservative Republicans.

“I want to laugh because it’s that ridiculous,” Francescut, 43, said of the allegations.

“People that work in this field, they’re doing this work because they care about elections,” she said. “They want the community to be better. They want what both sides want — transparent and accurate elections.”

During her 17-year tenure, the elections office got little public attention. But “once 2020 hit, people went from completely trusting us to, the day after election day, calling and yelling at our staff so much that we couldn’t get the work done to count ballots,” she said.

Curtis was a favorite of then-board chairman Kevin Crye, a hard-right supervisor who enlisted Lindell to support the county’s crusade against Dominion. Crye had survived a 2024 recall effort by just 50 votes.

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1. Carl Bott, co-owner of KCNR 96.5 FM, interviews Joanna Francescut on Feb. 25, 2026, in Redding, Calif. 2. Joanna Francescut’s campaign manager, Mary Williams, wears an orange button that reads “Vote for Jo for County Clerk” as Francescut waits in the offices of talk radio station KCNR.

Citing that close margin, Curtis said he believed recent elections were rigged because Republicans were not winning by large enough margins in a county where registered Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats.

In a letter to the U.S. Justice Department, Curtis said he had learned of lax security and potential ballot stuffing in 2024, the year of the attempted recall against Crye. Curtis sent a copy of the letter to Trump and requested a federal investigation because “the destruction of these ballots is nearing.”

In 2019 and 2024, a Shasta County grand jury investigated local election procedures and found no wrongdoing.

“How does it make me feel? Really angry,” Darling Allen, who is advising Francescut’s campaign, said of Curtis’ allegations. “It calls into question the integrity and character of every single person who worked in the elections department.”

To replace Francescut, Curtis hired Brent Turner, the guitarist from San Francisco. He is a longtime election reform activist who has pushed for nonproprietary open-source voting systems with software code that can be examined by anyone.

Turner described their partnership as: “Republican and Democrat team up to fight outdated software for elections. Oh, my!”

“We have to have the adult conversation in the United States that if the systems are loose enough to allow people — in this case, we’re talking about even people internal to the system — to cheat, they might cheat,” Turner said.

Last October, Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote to Curtis, asking him to detail planned changes to voting procedures. He responded with a 15-page letter.

Election observers, he wrote, were “treated like invaders … corralled behind spiked fences.” And drivers who picked up ballots from drop boxes sometimes left them in their vehicles. Under his watch, he wrote, “no detours or even bathroom breaks are allowed.”

A woman exits the Cottonwood Post Office in Shasta County.

Curtis told Weber that someone had carved death threats on his vehicle and left “antifa” business cards on his windshield wipers.

Weber’s communications team said in an email that her office “continues to monitor new election processes proposed by Shasta (or any county) County to ensure they do not violate state law.”

In his letter to Weber, Curtis promised to take a lie detector test after each election. Answering pre-written questions he had submitted, Curtis said in a January polygraph test that he did not change the results of the November election and believed a predecessor had rigged previous contests, according to a summary obtained by The Times.

The examiner wrote that he “was likely telling the truth.”

Inside the elections office, Curtis created a large room, decked out with American flags, for citizens to observe the vote-counting process.

More than a dozen large TV monitors display close-up video, also streamed online, of election workers’ hands inserting ballots into machines. On June 2, those workers will sit beneath iPhones hung overhead to record them while observers are positioned on barstools a few inches behind them.

The new public observation room at the Shasta County elections office is decorated with American flags.

Curtis has been traveling across California to tout his methods. He told The Times he has spoken about his video setup in Kern and San Joaquin counties and discussed it with candidates for state office.

And he advised the Riverside County citizens group that claimed to have found an overcount of 45,896 ballots in the November election for Proposition 50, which redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats.

Art Tinoco, the Riverside County registrar of voters, has refuted that number — saying it was based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.

After Bianco last week announced that his office had seized more than 650,000 ballots, Curtis appeared on the social media broadcast of a right-wing election integrity advocate who called him “the stealth behind the scenes in making that happen.”

Curtis smiled and repeated what he has been espousing since the early 2000s: “You can’t really trust a computer.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights set a deadline Tuesday that sounds much like two earlier deadlines, giving San José State University 10 days to comply with a list of athletics-related demands or face enforcement action, including the termination of the university’s federal funding.

This is the third 10-day deadline issued by the OCR to SJSU, the first in January and the second having expired last weekend. All three concern the same case, that of a transgender woman who played on the school’s women’s volleyball team from 2022 to 2024.

A federal investigation was launched in February 2025 after controversy over Blaire Fleming disrupted the 2024 volleyball season. Four Mountain West Conference teams — Boise State, Wyoming, Utah State and Nevada-Reno — chose to forfeit matches to SJSU.

The probe concluded that SJSU’s policies “allowing males to compete in women’s sports and access female-only facilities deny women equal educational opportunities and benefits.”

SJSU pushed back, insisting it followed the law in allowing Fleming to play. SJSU president Cynthia Teniente-Matson wrote in a March 6 letter to the campus community that the university “vigorously disputes the conclusions that OCR reached. … Our position is simple: We have followed the law and cannot be punished for doing so.”

SJSU requested that the OCR rescind its findings and close its investigation. Instead, the federal agency redoubled its efforts, with the latest salvo a “letter of impending enforcement” issued Tuesday and accompanied by a statement from U.S. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey.

“We have provided SJSU with multiple opportunities to resolve its Title IX violations with common sense actions: separating male and female athletes based on their biological sex, keeping men out of women’s locker rooms and bathrooms, restoring rightfully earned titles and accolades to female athletes, and apologizing to the women forced to forfeit competitions to protect themselves,” Richey said. “Yet, SJSU remains obstinate, choosing a radical ideology over safety, dignity, and fairness for its own students.

“With today’s action, the Department is putting the university on notice: comply with the law or risk losing its federal funding.”

SJSU enlisted the support of the California State University system, which sued the Department of Education on March 6 to challenge its allegedly “lawless overreach” and block the federal government from cutting funding to SJSU if the school does not agree to a proposed itemized resolution agreement.

“Whether and under what conditions transgender women should be allowed to compete in women’s athletics has been hotly contested,” the CSU lawsuit said. “But this case is not about that issue. It is about the Department’s attempt to punish SJSU, even though the law in the Ninth Circuit has been and is clear. Under Ninth Circuit law, Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause protect transgender students from discrimination.”

Suing the Education Department “is not a step we take lightly,” Teniente-Matson said. “However, we have a responsibility to defend the integrity of our institution and the rule of law, while ensuring that every member of our community is treated fairly and in accordance with the law.”

An estimated two-thirds of SJSU students receive federal financial aid totaling about $130 million annually, according to Cal State University. Losing federal funds could also disrupt $175 million in research.

The Office of Civil Rights’ proposed resolution agreement, which SJSU dismissed out of hand, contains the following demands:

1) Issue a public statement that SJSU will adopt biology-based definitions of the words “male” and “female” and acknowledge that the sex of a human — male or female — is unchangeable.

2) Specify that SJSU will follow Title IX by separating sports and intimate facilities based on biological sex.

3) State that SJSU will not delegate its obligation to comply with Title IX to any external association or entity and will not contract with any entity that discriminates on the basis of sex.

4) Restore to female athletes all individual athletic records and titles misappropriated by male athletes competing in women’s categories, and issue a personalized letter of apology on behalf of SJSU to each female athlete for allowing her participation in athletics to be marred by sex discrimination.

5) Send a personalized apology to every woman who played in SJSU’s women’s indoor volleyball from 2022 to 2024, beach volleyball in 2023, and to any woman on a team that forfeited rather than compete against SJSU while a male student was on the roster — expressing sincere regret for placing female athletes in that position.

In a related lawsuit, a Colorado district judge this month deferred ruling on motions to dismiss former SJSU volleyball player Brooke Slusser’s lawsuit against the California State University system. Slusser alleged that she was made to share bedrooms and changing spaces with Fleming without being informed that Fleming is transgender.

Judge Kato Crews dismissed the Mountain West Conference as a defendant but said he wants to put the rest of the case on hold until after a Supreme Court ruling in B.P.J. v. West Virginia, which is expected to come in June.

The B.P.J. case went to the Supreme Court after a transgender teen sued West Virginia to block a state law that prevents males from competing in girls’ high school sports.

On a night when my family watched Austin Reaves pull off the miraculous intentional missed free throw put-back basket on the way to a thrilling Laker overtime win against the Denver Nuggets, we talked more about the newest Lakers super fan on the way home. Kudos to Bill Plaschke for recognizing and capturing the power of 6-year-old Jackson Tuyay’s passionate cheering that helped ignite the laid-back crowd and inspire the Lakers to a huge comeback win. As a lifelong Laker fan since the same age as Jackson it was so awesome to see such innocent and authentic passion for the Lakers. In an arena full of stars in the stands and on the court it was the voice of a 6-year-old that reminded us how awesome it is to be a Lakers fan for life!

Paul Stapleton
Los Angeles

To quote Jackson Tuyay, “Yeaaaaah!” It looks like the Lakers can play some defense and beat the better teams after all.

Vaughn Hardenberg
Westwood

The Los Angeles Times welcomes expressions of all views. Letters should be brief and become the property of The Times. They may be edited and republished in any format. Each must include a valid mailing address and telephone number. Pseudonyms will not be used.

Email: sports@latimes.com

Times columnist Mirjam Swanson is right. Bam Adebayo is an impostor. If ever there was justification for an asterisk next to a record, his illegitimate assault on a scoring record is it. It was contrived and shameful.

Ron Yukelson
San Luis Obispo

Agree with Times columnist Mirjam Swanson, Bam Adebayo’s a fraud! It was a total setup once he got close to Kobe’s record-setting 81 points. Both teams … the Heat and the Wizards … conspired with their flopping and intentional fouling to get him to 83. Is this what the NBA has sunk to? Shame, shame.

Marty Zweben
Palos Verdes Estates

Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game, while impressive, appeared to be a sloppy affair comparable to an All-Star game full of dunks and threes. His field-goal percentage was under 50%. He shot 43 free throws. which was somewhat of an NBA disgrace. Kobe’s 81 took place in a game that was close most of the way, meant getting into a playoff spot, and demonstrated Kobe’s artistry in a majestic display of the entire offensive arsenal he worked so hard to perfect. He was a maestro and savant. I feel like he has been soiled.

Dell Franklin
Cayucos

There has already been much complaining about Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game, complaining that his teammates fed him the ball hoping that he would surpass Kobe’s single-game total of 81. Those of us of a certain age know that the exact same thing happened when Wilt scored 100 in 1962. Perhaps the thing to do is not to look to diminish this effort, but to appreciate it for the accomplishment it is. Congratulations to Bam.

Ronald O. Richards
Los Angeles

The EU’s six largest economies are urging Brussels to accelerate the long-awaited integration of capital markets to “strengthen Europe’s growth potential”, according to a letter sent on Tuesday to the Eurogroup boss and several EU commissioners.

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The finance ministers of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain say that making tangible progress on the rebranded “Savings and Investment Union” has become an “urgent necessity,” pledging to push “this important project forward”, in a letter addressed to EU economy chief Valdis Dombrovskis and Eurogroup President.

“Deeper and more integrated capital markets would strengthen Europe’s growth potential, enhance its economic sovereignty and provide a stronger foundation for financing common priorities,” the letter said.

In particular, the ministers call on EU institutions to reach an agreement among member states by summer on one of the key elements of the capital markets integration agenda: the Market Integration and Supervision Package (MISP).

The MISP is a set of legislative proposals by the European Commission aimed at strengthening the supervision of financial market infrastructures across the bloc and improving how they operate.

“A central purpose of the package is to remove national barriers and to improve cross border distribution of investment funds, so investors have better access to the EU capital markets and companies benefit from deeper pools of capital”, the letter says.

The six countries also ask the EU to advance its digital payments agenda, specifically by promoting private pan-European payment networks that can compete with US-based Visa and Mastercard, and by accelerating the adoption of the digital euro.

Agreement by the summer

Capital markets allow companies and governments to raise funds by selling assets such as shares or bonds to investors.

To strengthen and integrate these markets across the EU, the European Commission has proposed a series of legislative measures under the Savings and Investment Union package.

In recent months, EU countries and institutions have signalled a more ambitious goal, aiming for an agreement among co-legislators on most of the SIU legislation by June.

However, EU countries are not fully aligned on the technical aspects of capital markets integration, causing delays to the broader strategic agenda.

Another key legislative proposal is the revisions of the securitisation framework, which are EU rules introduced in 2019 with the objective of ensuring safer market practices, to avoid other financial crisis such as the 2008 global shock.

The revision, which aims to simplify certain requirements and reduce high operational costs, is to be approved by autumn 2026, according to signatories.

Digital payments

The six EU countries also support the development of additional pan-European private digital payment solutions, viewed as a key pillar of the EU’s strategic autonomy, since most digital payments are currently processed through US-based infrastructures.

According to 2025 European Central Bank data, Mastercard and Visa account for 61% of card payments and nearly 100% of cross-border ones.

In this context, the six countries are also calling for an accelerated rollout of a public digital payment solution: the digital euro. Currently under negotiation, it would be an electronic form of cash issued by the European Central Bank, serving as an additional payment option alongside cash and bank-issued cards.

The project is facing significant delays in the European Parliament. In particular, the leading rapporteur on the file, the Spanish centre-right MEP Fernando Navarrete, is pushing to reduce the scope of the digital euro to offline payments only, in order to avoid competing with other private infrastructure, such as Visa and Mastercard.

“We push for swift conclusions of the legislative process of the digital euro and we invite the European Parliament to follow the Council’s approach to establish the digital euro (in both its online and offline modalities) as a comprehensive, interoperable and sovereign European payment solution for European citizens”, the six countries wrote in the letter.

The co-legislators initially aimed for full adoption of the digital euro by the end of 2026. However, due to delays in the parliament, the six countries have not set a specific adoption deadline.