Fortress Group sells to Softbank, says Oakland stadium deal unaffected

There was some news last week that the group lead by Ronnie Lot which is pursuing the last minute “Save Oakland” deal for a Raiders stadium in the Bay Area was being bought out. The Japanese based SoftBank is indeed purchasing the Fortress Investment Group for $3.3 billion dollars.

With a new owner there was a chance of a change in direction for the group but it looks like it will not stop the pursuit of a stadium option in Oakland. The Fortress Group's spokesman Sam Singer says the sale “doesn't change anything” and that “Fortress is all in on the Raiders stadium deal.”. They do still have to get the Raiders and/or the NFL to be “all in” again with them for it to matter.

It is interesting timing with the stadium deal in Las Vegas running into some hiccups when casino mogul Sheldon Alderson withdrew his $650M investment. He did so under circumstances that his spokesman Andy Abboud described to the Las Vegas Journal as “picking his (Adelson's) pocket”. The removal of Adelson's money from the project also had Goldman Sach's remove their investment as well, their involvement had been contingent on the involvement of Sheldon Adelson.

The Fortress Group's attempt had been experiencing a bit of a boon from the financing fiasco the Raiders found themselves in without Adelson, however that was a short lived problem apparently. The report came in just a couple of days ago that the Raiders had found two new investors for the project, and now the report has since been confirmed by Clark County Co-Chairman Steve Sisek. Sisek failed to identify the new investors but did confirm their existence to Fox5 of Las Vegas.

There are tons of moving parts to all of this that will need to be sorted out before the owners vote on the Raiders relocation attempt on March 26^th. That is not a firm date though, if things are not ready for a vote at that time then the league could continue to push back their timing for any decision to be made.

This has been yet another episode of “How the Raiders Stadium Situation Turns”.