Two life insurers controlled by Dodgers and Lakers owner Mark Walter are under federal investigation over whether they properly disclosed billions of dollars in private credit investments tied to other parts of Walter's business empire, according to Bloomberg News.
Delaware Life Insurance Co. and Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co., both units of Group 1001, received grand jury subpoenas in February, the companies disclosed in June 26 regulatory filings. Prosecutors in Manhattan are examining whether the insurers failed to disclose that their private credit holdings backed other Walter-controlled ventures, in a probe running in parallel with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The subpoenas followed an earlier prosecutorial inquiry, opened last year, into Guggenheim Partners' $362 billion asset management arm, where Walter serves as chief executive. The FBI executed at least one search warrant in September to seize a mobile phone, though it's unclear which part of the investigation the device relates to.
Walter controls the insurers and holds a stake in Guggenheim through his holding company, TWG Global, which also holds stakes in the Dodgers, the Lakers, the WNBA's Sparks, and English Premier League club Chelsea, and is the primary financier of the PWHL. TWG said in a statement it "is aware of and cooperating with the investigation." Group 1001 said it is cooperating with investigators and that its capital position and liquidity remain strong. No charges have been filed against Walter or any of the companies, and investigations of this kind can close without enforcement action.
The subpoenas prompted Delaware Life and Clear Spring to run their own internal reviews, which turned up what the companies described as errors in prior financial reporting. The restatement was significant: Delaware Life had previously told regulators that roughly 3% of its investments, about $1.4 billion, involved related parties connected to Walter's other businesses. The corrected figure came in at more than $17 billion, or at least 39% of total invested assets, as of the most recent year-end. An earlier related-party total, as of December 2024, ran to more than $11 billion.
Delaware Life is now carrying out what the companies describe as a remediation plan to reduce its exposure to affiliated investments and shore up financial controls. S&P Global Ratings responded by revising the insurer's outlook from stable to negative, while affirming its A- financial strength rating.
Delaware Life carried about $69 billion in assets as of March, and Clear Spring roughly $16 billion, according to Bloomberg Law's reporting on the previously unreported filings. The relevant private credit positions date back at least two years, though the filings reviewed by Bloomberg Law don't specify exactly when the investments began.
The Walter probe lands in the middle of a broader regulatory push to get a handle on how much of the life insurance industry's balance sheet now sits in private credit arranged by, or connected to, an insurer's own ownership group. Insurance Business has tracked that shift closely over the past year. Moody's has warned that US life insurers' private credit push is creating liquidity and concentration risks, with the top 10 carriers alone holding $352 billion of the industry's private illiquid bonds. Separate analysis has found that privately-owned insurers now hold nearly 20% of US life industry assets, a concentration that has pushed the NAIC to expand its oversight of private-equity-owned carriers, including a revised bond-definition framework aimed at complex, related-party assets.
Regulators have been moving on this well before the Walter disclosures surfaced. The US Treasury convened domestic and international insurance regulators earlier this year specifically to discuss risks building up in the sector, with NAIC president Scott White naming portfolio transparency a top priority for 2026. More recently, rising defaults in the broader private credit market have sharpened that focus further, and hedge funds have built more than $5 billion in short positions against US life insurance stocks on concerns that annuity-funded exposure to private credit has outpaced insurers' available capital surplus.
Related-party structuring specifically, rather than private credit exposure generally, has also drawn scrutiny elsewhere in the sector; Insurance Business examined the dynamic in detail following a recent life insurer sale that hinged on similar questions about governance and investment concentration.
For policyholders, the immediate picture hasn't changed: Group 1001 says its capital position and liquidity remain strong, and S&P has left Delaware Life's A- financial strength rating in place even as it moved the outlook to negative. But the case is likely to be read by regulators and rating agencies as a live example of the exact disclosure gap the NAIC and Treasury have spent the past year trying to close: how clearly an insurer's private credit book discloses its ties back to its own ownership structure, and how much daylight exists between an insurer's stated related-party exposure and the real figure once regulators start asking questions.
Group 1001 said it remains focused on delivering value and service to its policyholders and their financial representatives as the remediation plan proceeds. The SEC and the US attorney's office in Manhattan declined to comment on the investigation; the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to Bloomberg.
