LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles Clippers continue to await the results of the NBA's investigation of a business relationship between Kawhi Leonard and a California company he had an endorsement deal with.
Last September, a report by journalist Pablo Torre alleged the team violated the NBA’s salary cap rules involving a $28 million endorsement contract between Leonard and the now-bankrupt California-based sustainability services company called Aspiration Fund Adviser LLC.
Leonard has denied any wrongdoing, saying he didn't receive all of the money he was owed from the company.
The Clippers have strongly denied that any rules were broken and said it welcomed the league’s investigation, which is being run by an outside firm.
“We haven’t learned anything more than we have in September,” Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations, said Monday. “We know it’s out there, we know at some point there’ll be a decision made. We very much feel the same thing that we told you back in September, that we’re on the right side of this. It really doesn’t impact anything we do on a daily basis.”
The Clippers are hosting this weekend’s NBA All-Star festivities at their year-old arena in Inglewood.
Clippers owner Steve Ballmer made a $50 million investment in Aspiration, and the company and the team announced a $300 million partnership in September 2021. That was about a month after Leonard signed a four-year, $176 million extension with the Clippers.
The team ended its relationship with Aspiration after two years, saying the contract was in default. Aspiration’s co-founder, Joseph Sanberg, agreed to plead guilty in August after facing federal charges of wire fraud. Prosecutors said he defrauded investors and lenders out of $248 million, adding that “Aspiration’s financial statements were inaccurate and reflected much higher revenue than the company in fact received.”
Aspiration owed Leonard about $7 million of the $28 million deal it had with him when the company filed for bankruptcy.
“I got to look back at the books,” Leonard said last September, “but it was more than that, for sure.”
Asked if he received the money he was owed, Leonard replied, “Uh, no, but the company went belly up. It was fraud as everyone knows.”
As for the allegation that he did nothing in exchange for being paid by Aspiration, Leonard said, “I don’t think it’s accurate.”
___
AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBA
