Jeanie Buss has no right to stop her siblings from selling their Lakers shares, her siblings argue. In a response to her August petition Wednesday, they write, “Jeanie’s argument is at most a meaningless academic exercise.”
Jeanie Buss on Aug. 23 sought to stop Johnny, James, Janie, Joey, and Jesse Buss from selling the family’s remaining 17.8% stake in the Lakers after Mark Walter’s stunning deal with Joshua Kushner that valued the NBA team at $12.5 billion. In her petition, she pointed to a 2017 court order requiring the family to “take all actions reasonably available” to keep her as the team’s governor, a role she negotiated for as part of Walter’s purchase of the Lakers last year.
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The Buss’s stake is held in a family trust, and Jeanie Buss maintains her siblings cannot compel the family to exit, nor can they sell down the stake to below 15%, which is the NBA’s threshold for someone to remain team governor.
According to her siblings’ response Wednesday to the petition, the “straight forward application of the unambiguous, controlling provision of the Trust Agreement regarding termination of the Trust defeats Jeanie’s position and requires that the Petition either be dismissed or denied in its entirety.”
As they see it, the family trust stipulates that they have the right to divest if at least two-thirds vote to sell, and Jeanie Buss has no legal power to stop them from doing so. Nothing in the 2017 court order prevents them from exercising that right, they argue.
They claim Jeanie Buss’s petition is “driven by her own personal desire to preserve” her leadership roles with the Lakers, and she is violating her fiduciary duty to the other Buss siblings by failing to consider that the family could make $2.2 billion through the sale.
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“Jeanie’s efforts by the Petition to avoid this inescapable conclusion for her own self-interested reasons are contrary to the Trust Agreement’s express terms, constitute a breach of her fiduciary duties as a trustee, and must be rejected,” the response says.
Walter’s deal to sell the Lakers came as his sprawling investment empire faces its own federal investigation tied to faulty disclosures.
The dispute is not expected to impact the proposed sale to Kushner and Bob Iger.
Representatives for Jeanie Buss and the other Buss siblings did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
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