Many people are saying, Balmer can travel to that Florida golf club and make a large “donation” to make any criminal charges go away as per the customs of emperor Cheeto Maximus Dementia Supreme.

It’s also a clear violation of the UFTA which California has adopted.

The daktronics piece is going to be a big fucking problem because it’s a publicly traded company so shareholders are going to sue for relief.

It would need to be a state case. I’m sure everyone involved here is rich enough to afford enough Trump Coin to avoid the Justice Department coming after them.

“Thing of value” is not an element of the wire fraud statute. It is very strictly “money or property.” Intangible non-property rights like “salary cap relief” would not hold up on a motion to dismiss.

I also don’t see it satisfying the wire fraud statute even if you argued for missed luxury tax payments because here luxury tax payments are an incidental byproduct of the scheme, not a feature of it (although obviously significant to the league itself). The case law is pretty clear that the money or property obtained has to be the object of the scheme that they are depriving from the victim.

This is almost entirely a CBA issue. The NBA is a self regulating body and cap circumvention itself is its own created rule. Unless there are some other wild facts involved here that haven’t been disclosed, there’s nothing criminal about what happened.

LOL. There is no criminal liability. It’s purely a private matter. If there is liability, it’s civil. There is no salary cap relief here because the ability to pay over the max didn’t exist.

Why would the government consider “salary cap relief” a thing of value. The US government is not at all concerned with the salary cap.

That’d be like calling taking some printer paper from another department in your company theft. It’s purely an internal issue.

You guys must be new to corruption and billionaires

Nothing significant will happen to Ballmer

I think you would be hard pressed to show that the other teams were defrauded. Even if you could show the material misrepresentation, it would be tough to prove that the other teams materially relied upon the misrep.

The NBA salary cap rules is not a law. Any violation is just an employment issue. It would be interesting if there was some tax violation give what Aspiration was involved with vis a vis the Clippers/Ballmer.

“Defraud”

I love it when non-lawyers try to give legal opinions and clearly have no idea what they are talking about.

as I see it, its not against the law for endorsement, its against the business contract, no law is being broken only a contractual rule.

now where and when taxes on these moneys were paid by all parties, that might be breaking the law.

18 U.S. Code § 1349 does not define wire fraud, it expands the offense to cover attempts and conspiracies to commit wire fraud.

18 U.S. Code § 1343 defines wire fraud, which almost certainly don’t apply in the Kawhi situation. Fraud is defined as “scheme… to defraud… money or property…”. I don’t think “cheating in a billionaire club game for trophy and banners” fits that. Even if it does, the billionaires will not testify in criminal court against each other.

You can read the code yourself:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343

Tax issues likely a bigger deal. Payments to professional athletes for their athletic performance has a different set of tax liabilities than payments to professional athletes for endorsing products. Specifically, many states enact “jock taxes” on the pay of visiting professional athletes, so any mislabeling of pay as “for endorsing products” instead of “for athletic performance” means that those states weren’t paid their full due.

Once Ballmer’s bribe hits he’ll get a presidential pardon for any NBA cap circumvention. Cause we live in lawless times now thanks to the psychos

Is there an argument for some sort of white collar financial crime or fraud being committed? I mean, sure there’s an argument. Is it one that rises to the level that any prosecutor would try and take it to trial? Extremely unlikely.

I will say, from the beginning I’ve thought there are only two reasonable explanations for the story. Either cap circumvention or actual fraud of some kind. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive though.

I’ve been saying this since the Aspirations stuff came to light. This isn’t just cap circumvention, it’s illegal. It’s corporate and securities fraud or wire fraud. If any of this shit was taken seriously, he should be under criminal investigation.

I have said this repeatedly in other threads, but the Clippers avoiding paying payroll taxes on payments through Kahwi seem like the bigger issue. There are a ton of possible legal issues about where that money was paid from and possible tax avoidance/reduction by shifting the state it was being paid from.