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.
In a recent letter, Iowa officials called collateral loans “the most easily exploited asset class for capital arbitrage.” Under current rules, insurance companies must hold just 6.8% of the value of collateral loans as a capital cushion, no matter what’s backing them. By comparison, direct investments in equity or other risky assets might require capital charges of 30% or more.
The rule change would assign capital charges to the loans based on the underlying collateral. Although the details are still being hashed out, for a collateral loan backed by an interest in a private limited-liability company, joint venture or partnership, the charge might rise to as much as 30% from 6.8%. Security Benefit recently disclosed that more than $8 billion of its collateral loans are backed by those kinds of entities.
Lobby Support
“All insurers are entitled to reasonable time to adjust to regulatory changes without undue disruption,” Security Benefit said in an emailed statement Wednesday. The main industry lobby supported the slower timeline, and the insurer’s collateral loans have “a long, successful track record with zero defaults,” it added. “Security Benefit has navigated significant regulatory changes before and has the financial strength and flexibility to do so again.”
In a statement, the Kansas Department of Insurance said its staffers routinely attend meetings of the working group as visitors, although their presence isn’t noted in meeting minutes if they don’t speak. A review of minutes of 38 recent meetings found no other examples where Kansas was mentioned as participating as a non-member.
The campaign-donation haul from Boehly and his associates amounts to more than a third of the $895,000 that Schmidt has reported raising from donors for her gubernatorial campaign. She was first elected insurance commissioner in 2018 and her current term expires next year.
Kansas law limits contributions for statewide primary campaigns to $4,000 per donor. Most of the Boehly-related contributions were for that maximum amount. In addition to executives from Security Benefit and Eldridge Industries, other contributions poured in from employees at New York-based A24; Zinnia Tech Solutions, a Connecticut-based insurance service provider; Metropolis Technologies, a parking-technology outfit in California; and G-Form, a Rhode Island-based maker of athletic gear.
Even Peter Shapiro, the owner of The Capitol Theatre, in Port Chester, New York, sent in $4,000. That’s where Boehly holds his lavish holiday parties. Shapiro didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Photo: Todd Boehly, chairman and chief executive officer of Eldridge Industries LLC, at the Semafor World Economy Summit during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Spring meetings in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, April 13, 2026. The International Monetary Fund said that the conflict in the Middle East is a major supply shock that will test the resilience of a world with limited scope for fiscal support, even as US and Iran have negotiated a two-week ceasefire.
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