One scoop to start: Elliott Management has built a stake in French industrial gas group Air Liquide, setting the stage for the activist hedge fund’s latest campaign targeting a European corporate giant. And another thing: UBS has won a significant victory in its battle with the Swiss government after influential lawmakers backed a major watering-down of proposed regulations that would see requirements for the toughest form of capital slashed by half. In today’s newsletter: The ruthless world of corporate bankruptcies and the polite game of golf have dramatically collided.

DD’s Sujeet Indap and the FT’s Sam Agini scooped on Monday that the renegade circuit LIV Golf was approaching a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing as soon as next week. The restructuring comes as the Saudi Public Investment Fund halts its financial support after ploughing more than $5bn into LIV since the tour burst on to the scene in 2021, paying for big prize pots and huge contracts to lure top golfers. The bankruptcy will allow PIF to cleanly exit LIV, but questions remain about how much players who are owed bonuses will be made whole, to say nothing of vendors to LIV tournaments who have sued in recent weeks saying they’ve been stiffed.

Most interesting to DD is what comes after the ostensible restructuring. BC Partners has for several weeks been negotiating a funding package to stand up a slimmed-down “LIV 2.0”. Multiple people told the FT that the private capital firm also had its eyes on LIV’s $5bn in “net operating losses” and was examining an equity-like investment that would preserve them.

Those NOLs can be used to offset the future taxable income of an acquirer. BC Partners may lead an investment of as much as $300mn to acquire the LIV assets and create a vehicle to “roll up” other sports assets that can together utilise the NOLs, according to a person familiar with BC’s thinking. A bankruptcy brawl involving big-time athletes, a sovereign wealth fund and sports moguls will be one of the most interesting dramas of late 2026.

If you track golf and the US bankruptcy code, it may be the story of a lifetime. KKR diverged from its rivals over the past decade as it began using its own balance sheet to invest in deals. On Monday the private capital giant proved just how lucrative that strategy could be with the announcement that it will mint one of the single biggest ever private equity gains from the sale of USI Insurance Services.

KKR will receive $3.3bn in after-tax cash from the $17bn sale of the insurance and employee benefits broker to insurer Aon. That will amount to a gain of about 3.4 times on about $1bn that the New York-based investment group invested in the company from 2017 through 2023. Those who invested in the KKR fund that invested alongside the firm’s original balance sheet bet in 2017 will see an even bigger gain of about six times their investment.

The firm touted the sale as vindicating a strategy that executives have compared to Warren Buffett’s investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. KKR began exploring the approach after going public in 2010 as it sought ways to supplement its predominantly fee-based earnings by investing a large pot of its own cash into KKR deals. In 2024, the firm tweaked the strategy, creating a “strategic holdings” unit made up of KKR’s share of more than $10bn in investments in nearly two dozen private equity deals it believed would gain in value and generate growing dividends.

Some argue the strategy has weighed on KKR’s valuation, in part because of the unpredictable nature of private equity deals compared to relatively steady fee income. KKR’s valuation has lagged that of rivals such as Blackstone, as investors worry about the risk to KKR of being on the hook for losses if deals go sour or the market turns. But on Monday KKR’s shares jumped nearly 2 per cent as the market welcomed the strategy’s debut windfall.

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