We have more information about who the heck Giants owner Scott Seligman is
Remember, all of this is "allegedly." There, I've covered my ass, right?
Before we get started, I have heard that Gmail addresses have a tendency to send this newsletter to the Promotions section instead of Inbox, which is its just and rightful place. One solution I have heard about from my Gentleman’s Challenge competitor Mike is to manually drag the email from Promotions to Inbox, and then Google should ask you if you always want this newsletter to come to your inbox, and then you just click yes.
If you’re having this issue, hopefully this solution works for you. If not, sorry I’ve written two paragraphs that don’t apply to you in any way. Onward!
For the first time, we have an update to one of my Who The Heck Is This Giants Owner articles, and it’s the very first one. Do you remember Scott Seligman? He’s a rich guy who owns part of the Giants, if that helps jog your memory. Can’t imagine why you’d need more information, but just to cover my bases (baseball term!), he’s a real estate developer and large scale landlord whose company, The Seligman Group, is classified as a Family Investment Office. Also, they have a bank that seems to be a sister company. I wonder if that bank will come up in the next couple of paragraphs!
Friends, the bank is coming up in the next paragraph.
According to the Detroit News, YiHou Han, an executive at Sterling Bankcorp, the bank in question, is scheduled to plead guilty next month to bank and wire fraud conspiracy. Her crimes — and we’ll get to the specifics in a moment — were also known to people such as “Executive 1” at “Financial Institution A,” which are references to Seligman and the Sterling Bank, respectively.
Han’s crime involved offering adjustable rate mortgages, mostly to “members of the Asian community” on the West Coast. The bank got $5 billion in loans from this program, but to do it, Han fudged the applicants’ records, falsifying documents and concealing information.
Here’s a somewhat damning statement (from the Detroit News):
"The defendant and her co-conspirators knowingly provided Advantage Loan Program loans to borrowers involved in money laundering and tax-evasion activity," the Justice Department trial attorneys wrote in the criminal case.
Han personally made more than $3 million from these loans.
“Hey,” you’re perhaps saying. “That sounds pretty bad and all, but are we sure that Scott Seligman, the Giants owner who we’re here to talk about, did anything worse than turning a blind eye to this program?”
To be blunt, yes.
Before the criminal case, the bank was making quite a lot of money lending to people who senior executives, including Seligman, knew they should not have lended to. Therefore, when the company went public in 2017 based on financial data that Seligman knew was bad — Allegedly! Gotta get another “allegedly” in after the subhed! — and he and his family sold 9.5 million shares of stock for a shade under $115 million, that was a crime.
Also, he told Han to falsify documents and hide information from the underwriters. That’s bad, right?
Seligman knew the stock was overvalued and that’s why he sold it. The bank was a paper tiger using bad financial information to artificially inflate its value so that the people with the stock could sell it and make a lot of money.
A couple years after going public, in 2019, the company fired Han and Seligman resigned; since 2019, a large chunk of Sterling’s workforce has either quit or been fired, and the loan program is (as you might expect) dead.
So how does this all affect the Giants? Seligman is a minority owner, and while he likely owns a large chunk for a minority owner, he’s nowhere near Charles Johnson’s share of the team. If the league or the rest of the ownership group wants to force him out, it’s a whole lot more plausible than getting rid of Johnson.
Of course, in a fun bit of irony, Charles Johnson himself might be the one to buy some of Seligman’s shares. Doing that after other investors left is how he became the biggest owner of the Giants in the first place. So sure, the team would get rid of a criminal, but in the process they’d just give more power and control to a guy who fans sure don’t want to see have more power and control.
(Johnson, by the way, has not received refunds from the racists and wackjobs whose political campaigns he just happens to keep funding. Oh well! What can you do? It’s not like he’ll definitely do it again as soon as there’s another election and also he probably doesn’t even want the money back, right?)
It would not be surprising to see Seligman removed from the Giants ownership group —as of May 10, he is still listed on the website as a principal partner — but it will take some political maneuvering from Rob Manfred and/or will and determination from the rest of the group. Could they find a way to buy out his shares? Absolutely; it’s not like they’re short on rich people. Will they? Probably only if someone makes them.
Rob Manfred has plenty on his plate right now, what with all the stupid rules he’s trying to implement throughout the minors so that he can then immediately also put them in the majors. But this is really up to him. Mets owner Fred Wilpon had extensive ties to Bernie Madoff, and he still got to own the Mets for a long time before selling the team for a hefty profit. Seligman does not have the institutional power that Wilpon had, but he’s also a much more obscure figure. I’d imagine the issue will be addressed and he will quietly sell his shares and no longer be part of the Giants, but there’s no way to tell.
Like Manfred, Seligman has a lot on his plate, and like Manfred none of it is good. All we can do is wait and see.
(Thanks to Roger from There R Giants for the tip on this, by the way. If you want information on Giants minor leaguers, that’s the site for you.)