Problems keep cropping up for New York Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz.
The team’s financial problems have been well documented, and now news has surfaced that commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball secretly provided the owners with $25 million in November to help with their shortcomings, The New York Times reports.
Wilpon and Katz are facing lawsuits from victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The victims are seeking up to $1 billion from the owners and claim that Wilpon and Katz ignored warnings about Madoff’s investment business.
According to the Times, the Mets have accumulated more than $400 million in debt, and sources claim that the money handed out by Selig may have been what kept the team running at that point.
“We said in October that we expected to have a short-term liquidity issue,” the Mets said in a statement Friday. “To address this, we did receive a loan from Major League Baseball in November. Beyond that, we will not discuss the matter any further.”
Wilpon and Katz have agreed to sell shares of the team, but would like to remain majority owners.
