Todd Boehly and dozens of his associates contributed more than $300,000 to the Kansas insurance commissioner’s gubernatorial campaign, weeks before her office helped one of the billionaire’s companies win a delay of new capital rules.
A slew of Boehly’s companies, including Topeka-based Security Benefit Life Insurance Co., donated en masse in late December, joined by executives and their spouses and other relatives, Kansas records show. Commissioner Vicki Schmidt is in charge of regulating Kansas insurance companies and is seeking the Republican nomination for governor.
At the time, a working group at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners was considering a proposal to tighten capital requirements for investments known as collateral loans. Proponents wanted the change to take effect by the end of 2026.
The measure may be costly for Security Benefit, whose $14 billion collateral-loan stockpile is by far the life insurance industry’s biggest. In a nine-page letter, Security Benefit decried the proposal and urged the panel to move more slowly.
A few weeks after the donations, Tish Becker, an official in Schmidt’s office, attended a working group meeting and advocated delaying the change until the end of 2027, according to minutes of the February meeting. Becker wasn’t a member of the working group and attended as a visitor. At a subsequent meeting, the group decided to follow the slower timeline that Kansas recommended.
“We are supportive of rules that make sense,” Boehly’s main holding company, Eldridge Industries, said in an emailed statement. The firm and its affiliates “invest in leaders we believe in. As such, we have and will continue to encourage our extensive network to support candidates and elected officials who lead pragmatically.”
A representative for Boehly said he and Eldridge Industries executives didn’t reimburse anyone for donations.
“Donations to the campaign have no bearing on policy decisions made at the Insurance Department,” Schmidt’s campaign said in a statement. “Many Kansas businesses, like Security Benefit, have long supported Vicki Schmidt.”
‘Reasonable Timeline’
The Kansas Department of Insurance “consistently advocated that the NAIC not deviate from its normal protocol which allows for a reasonable timeline for the implementation of all changes to ensure companies can properly plan for them,” Holli Kroeker, a spokesperson for the department, said in an emailed statement. “This helps create regulatory certainty and limits unintended disruptions in the industry.”
Boehly is best known for splashy sports and entertainment holdings, including stakes in the Chelsea football club, the Los Angeles Dodgers and independent film studio A24. But the core of his business empire is Security Benefit, a 134-year-old insurance company that sells annuities to retirees and invests much of the cash in assets managed by other parts of Miami-based Eldridge Industries.
As of the end of last year, collateral loans made up about 25% of Security Benefit’s total invested assets. Almost all of them were backed by assets managed by Eldridge Industries affiliates. The company’s outsize reliance on the asset type has prompted scrutiny from ratings firms, regulators and creditors, Bloomberg News reported in 2024.
Read More: Boehly’s Insurer Reaps Gains and Doubts From Loans to His Firms
In fact, Security Benefit accounted for about 47% of the entire life insurance industry’s holdings of collateral loans as of December 2024, according to Moody’s Corp.
In its letter to the working group earlier this year, Security Benefit argued that such loans are less risky than their underlying collateral, and that the working group had no evidence they’ve performed poorly in the past. It warned of a “potentially large capital impact” for some companies and called the working group’s pace “unnecessarily hurried.”
If the rule change happened too fast, Security Benefit went on, insurers might be forced to unload assets into illiquid markets at low prices.
Proponents of a swifter rule change included representatives of the Iowa insurance department, who said in February that discussions at the NAIC gave insurers the necessary time to prepare.