Mark Walter has a reputation as one of Wall Street’s savviest operators. The son of a factory worker from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he parlayed a meeting with a descendant of the Guggenheim mining and art-gallery dynasty into Guggenheim Partners LLC, a financial services giant with $320 billion under management. Much of the firm’s success—and Walter’s estimated $6 billion wealth—derives from buying sleepy regional insurance companies, putting the premiums into higher-risk, higher-return investments and keeping a big chunk of the profits. More recently he’s turned his attention to sports, acquiring major stakes in the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Los Angeles Lakers and Chelsea Football Club, using his gift for financial engineering to pull off league-upending deals. When baseball star Shohei Ohtani was introduced in Los Angeles in December as the highest-paid athlete ever, it was Walter, 64, he shared the stage with.
Two months later, in an austere building off a highway in the Indian city of Gurugram, police opened an investigation into another investment involving Walter—one that had received zero publicity and been altogether less successful. Between 2011 and this month, Infrastructure India Plc (IIP) had received $320 million from companies owned by or connected to Walter and Guggenheim Partners, primarily to build a logistics powerhouse that would shuttle everything from steel girders to iPhones around the subcontinent’s railways.