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The Inter football club has a new owner: the US company Oaktree Capital Management, which took over 99.6 percent of the shares from the Zhang family as a pledge for a loan made in 2021 and not repaid by the May 21 deadline . Oaktree was founded in 1995 in Los Angeles, California, and is an asset management company, to which companies and other companies entrust their money to invest it in a profitable way. Today Oaktree manages assets of 192 billion dollars, i.e. over 175 billion euros at current exchange rates.
Its clients include sixty-five of the one hundred largest U.S. pension funds, over five hundred corporations from around the world, two hundred and seventy-five foundations, and fifteen sovereign wealth funds. In 2019 the Canadian company Brookfield Corporation, which does something similar to Oaktree, purchased 62 percent of Oaktree’s shares for just under 4.5 billion euros, becoming one of the largest asset management companies in the world. world, with approximately 900 billion dollars under management. Brookfield therefore owns the majority of the shares of Oaktree, which however continues to operate independently.
Oaktree already has investments in the world of sports. Since 2020 he has owned 80 percent of Caen, a French team that plays in Ligue 2, the equivalent of our Serie B. As the Gazzetta dello Sport, Oaktree managed to fix the economic situation of the club, which when it was purchased had just been relegated to Ligue 2 and had many budget problems. To do so, he had rationalized costs, firing 40 percent of the employees and reducing the so-called “money of salaries” (the amount spent to pay the players’ salaries) and focused on player trading, i.e. the valorisation and sale of players at high prices. higher than those of purchase.
After a first season in which Caen even risked relegation again, in the following three years they achieved a seventh, a fifth and a sixth place, good results but not enough to return to Ligue 1. Even outside the sporting field, among the things that Oaktree does is to economically relaunch clubs that for some reason are in bad shape, and it can be said that with Caen this objective has been partly achieved because today the club is more stable, even if it is not been promoted to Ligue 1. Now the US club is apparently looking for a buyer to whom they can sell Caen: they will do the same with Inter too, it needs to be understood whether they will try to do it immediately or whether they will first remain owners for a few years.
Oaktree’s other sports holdings concern the minority shares that one of the company’s co-founders, Stephen Kaplan, owns in the Welsh football team Swansea (which plays in the Championship, the second English division) and in the Memphis Grizzlies, which play in NBA, the main North American basketball league. Another of the co-founders, Bruce Karsh, has a minority stake (i.e. he owns a small part) of another NBA team, the Golden State Warriors.
2024-05-22 09:41:03
#Oaktree #owner #Inter
