Billionaire Blavatnik courted to take Daily Telegraph stake
The billionaire who has bankrolled DAZN, the sports-streaming service, is being courted to take a stake in The Daily Telegraph alongside the newspaper's new American majority-owners.
Sky News has learnt that Sir Len Blavatnik, whose holding company Access Entertainment owns assets in Britain, including the Theatre Royal Haymarket, has been approached by RedBird Capital Partners about becoming a minority investor in the Telegraph titles.
Two sources close to the situation said on Thursday that Sir Len was being sounded out about a deal, although they cautioned that no agreement had been struck and it remained unclear whether one would be.
Sir Len, who was knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II for services to philanthropy in 2017, is a prolific investor in the arts, media and entertainment industries.
Access Entertainment is run by Danny Cohen, the former BBC director of television.
Announcing its agreement to acquire Telegraph Media Group last month for an enterprise valuation of £500m, RedBird Capital said it was "in discussions with select UK-based minority investors with print media expertise and strong commitment to upholding the editorial values of the Telegraph".
This was principally a reference to Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail proprietor, who remains in talks to pay more than £30m for a stake in the Mail's rival right-leaning newspaper group.
Goldman Sachs is advising DMGT on the investment, with a deal the subject of ongoing discussions, according to insiders.
Read more:
The Abu Dhabi state-backed vehicle IMI is still expected to acquire the maximum 15% stake in the Telegraph permitted under proposed new media ownership rules.
The government's decision to set the ownership threshold at 15% follows an intensive lobbying campaign by newspaper industry executives concerned that a permanent outright ban could cut off a vital source of funding to an already-embattled industry.
However, the deal faces continued opposition from parliamentarians, with The Guardian reporting on Thursday that a cross-party group had written to Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, warning of "potential Chinese state influence" because of links between RedBird Capital chair John Thornton and China's sovereign wealth fund.
This suggestion has been dismissed by RedBird Capital insiders.
Ukraine-born Sir Len's portfolio of investments includes DAZN, which is now also backed by a Saudi sports group, mobile games studio Tripledot and Scenario Two, a theatre production company.
Dovid Efune, the owner of The New York Sun, is meanwhile continuing to assemble a rival bid for the Telegraph, having secured backing from Jeremy Hosking, the prominent City investor.
His prospects, however, look to have diminished after the former chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, was reported to have withdrawn from his so-called 'British bid'.
The Telegraph titles' parent company was forced into insolvency proceedings two years ago by Lloyds Banking Group, which ran out of patience with the Barclay family, their long-standing owner.
RedBird IMI, a joint venture between the two firms, paid £600m several months later to acquire a call option that was intended to convert into ownership of the Telegraph newspapers and The Spectator magazine.
That objective was thwarted by a change in media ownership laws, which banned any form of foreign state ownership.
Some parliamentarians are continuing to argue that a 15% threshold would be too high, and that the proposed rules are ambiguous because they potentially allow for more than one state investor to aggregate their holdings in British newspapers.
The Spectator was sold last year for £100m to Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge fund billionaire, who has installed Lord Gove, the former cabinet minister, as its editor.
RedBird Capital has been contacted for comment, while a call to Access Industries' London office went unanswered on Thursday lunchtime.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Here is Why Sable Offshore (SOC) Fell This Week
The share price of Sable Offshore Corp. (NYSE:SOC) fell by 4.66% between June 3 and June 10, 2025, putting it among the Energy Stocks that Lost the Most This Week. Let's shed some light on the development. Copyright: 1971yes / 123RF Stock Photo Sable Offshore Corp. (NYSE:SOC) is a Houston-based independent upstream company focused on developing the prolific Santa Ynez Unit in federal waters offshore California. Sable Offshore Corp. (NYSE:SOC) continues to sink after Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Donna Geck ordered the company to halt restart efforts on the operation's onshore pipeline system while a related lawsuit is being resolved. The restraining order will remain in effect through at least mid-July and could even be extended. As a result, Sable has now pushed back their restart timeline from the beginning of July to August 1, 2025. Sable Offshore Corp. (NYSE:SOC) posted significant gains in May after the company announced that it had restarted oil production at the previously dormant Santa Ynez Unit. However, the stock has now sunk by more than 30% over the last two weeks following the interventions by the court and the California Coastal Commission. While we acknowledge the potential of SOC as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 10 Cheap Energy Stocks to Buy Now and Disclosure: None. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump finds victories at the Supreme Court in rush of emergency cases
By Andrew Chung (Reuters) -Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, his administration has bombarded the U.S. Supreme Court with emergency requests seeking immediate intervention to free up his initiatives stymied by lower courts. The strategy is paying off. Once a rarely used pathway to the nation's top judicial body, its emergency docket now bulges with an unprecedented volume of requests for rapid attention by the justices in clashes over Trump's far-reaching executive actions. As the Republican president tests the limits of executive power under the U.S. Constitution, Trump's administration has made 19 emergency applications to the court in less than five months, with one other such application filed by lawyers for migrants held in Texas who were on the verge of deportation. The court already has acted in 13 of these cases. It has ruled in Trump's favor nine times, partially in his favor once, against him twice and postponed action in one case that ultimately was declared moot. Trump's wins have given him the green light to implement contentious policies while litigation challenging their legality continues in lower courts. The court, for instance, let Trump revoke the temporary legal status granted for humanitarian reasons to hundreds of thousands of migrants, implement his ban on transgender people in the U.S. military and take actions to downsize the federal workforce, among other policies. The court's 6-3 conservative majority includes three justice who Trump appointed during his 2017-2021 first presidential term. Six more emergency requests by the administration remain pending at the court and one other emergency request was withdrawn. Among the requests still to be acted upon are Trump's bid to broadly enforce his order to restrict birthright citizenship, to deport migrants to countries other than their own including politically unstable South Sudan and to proceed with mass federal layoffs called "reductions in force." Emergency applications to the court involving Trump policies have averaged about one per week since he began his second term. His administration's applications this year match the total brought during Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden's four years as president. "The Trump administration uses every legal basis at its disposal to implement the agenda the American people voted for," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Reuters. "The Supreme Court will continue to have to step in to correct erroneous legal rulings that district court judges enter solely to block the president's policies." 'STRONG CASES' The administration has "not sought Supreme Court review in all the cases it could, and part of the story may be that the government is appealing what it thinks are strong cases for it," said Sarah Konsky, director of the University of Chicago Law School's Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic. Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck, who wrote a book about the court's emergency docket, said in a blog post on Thursday that the results favoring Trump should not be attributed only to the court's ideological makeup. At a time when Trump and his allies have verbally attacked judges who have impeded aspects of his sweeping agenda, there is a "very real possibility that at least some of the justices ... are worried about how much capital they have to expend in confrontations with President Trump," Vladeck wrote. The onslaught of emergency applications has diverted the attention of the justices as they near the end of the court's current term. June is usually their busiest month as they rush to finish writing opinions in major cases. For instance, they have yet to decide the fate of Tennessee's Republican-backed ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Among the emergency-docket cases, the court most recently on June 6 allowed Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, a key player in his drive to slash the federal workforce, broad access to personal data on millions of Americans in Social Security Administration systems and blocked a watchdog group from receiving records on DOGE operations. The court also has allowed Trump to cut millions of dollars in teacher training grants and to fire thousands of probationary federal employees. On the other side of the ledger, the court has expressed reservations about whether the administration is treating migrants fairly, as required under the Constitution's guarantee of due process. On May 16, it said procedures used by the administration to deport migrants from a Texas detention center under Trump's invocation of a 1798 law historically used only in wartime failed basic constitutional requirements. The justices also declined to let the administration withhold payment to foreign aid organizations for work already performed for the government. QUESTIONS OF TRANSPARENCY Trump turned to the emergency docket during his first term as well. His prior administration filed 41 such applications to the court. During the 16 years prior, the presidential administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama filed just eight combined, according to Vladeck. The court has quickly decided weighty matters using the emergency docket in a way often at odds with its traditional practice of considering full case records from lower courts, receiving at least two rounds of written briefings and then holding oral arguments before rendering a detailed written ruling. It is sometimes called the "shadow docket" because cases often are acted upon without the usual level of transparency or consideration. Some recent decisions on the emergency docket have come with brief opinions explaining the court's reasoning. But typically they are issued as bare and unsigned orders offering no rationale. Konsky noted that the justices sometimes designate emergency cases for regular review with arguments and full briefing. "But in any event, the emergency docket raises complicated questions that are likely to continue to play out in the coming years," Konsky said. Among Trump's emergency applications this year, oral arguments were held only in the birthright citizenship dispute. The liberal justices, often findings themselves on the losing side, have expressed dismay. Once again "this court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent in the Social Security data case. "The risk of error increases when this court decides cases -as here - with barebones briefing, no argument and scarce time for reflection," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the teacher grants case. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito defended the emergency docket in 2021, saying there is "nothing new or shadowy" about the process and that it has wrongly been portrayed as sinister.
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What a pastor's fight over financial transparency in SBC achieved despite his latest loss
DALLAS — South Carolina pastor Rhett Burns set out to change how the Southern Baptist Convention thinks about financial transparency, and the denomination's top policymaking body defeated many of his hopes. But Burns' advocacy didn't fall on deaf ears, as his congregation at First Baptist Church (FBC) Travelers Rest can attest to. 'It's God's money and we want to have an open hand and be up front with everybody,' Ron Tweedy, a deacon at FBC Travelers Rest, said in an interview. 'And at the end of the day, I just have the same expectation for our denomination as I do for our church.' Tweedy was one of five parishioners to accompany their pastor to Dallas this week as delegates, called messengers, on behalf of FBC Travelers Rest, a congregation of no more than 100. The FBC Travelers Rest delegation cheered on their pastor at the SBC annual meeting as Burns called for stronger requirements for SBC-affiliated agencies to publicly disclose more details about spending, including the salaries of top executives. Burns advocated for the same basic SBC policy changes at the 2023 and 2024 SBC annual meetings, and this year he yet again he faced resistance. Almost none of the legislative proposals that Burns and his allies pushed for moved forward in any meaningful way, and a June 11 floor debate highlighted the differing views among Southern Baptists about how to strengthen financial accountability. Though divided, messengers at the Dallas meeting displayed a greater interest in the denomination's financial health and how to best monitor that health going forward. These differing sentiments emerged when Burns brought a proposed measure that dealt with reporting requirements about executive pay. Burns argues that requiring SBC-affiliated agencies, called entities, to publish detailed financial information like executive pay helps promote trust between those entities and everyday Southern Baptists. The Nashville-based denomination's collective budget, called the Cooperative Program, receives income from church giving and supports 10 major entities. 'I wish we could get back to a point where we trust one another more,' Burns said in an interview. Burns believes having the right guardrails in place instills more confidence in Southern Baptists that entities are responsibly spending that income received from church giving. But a legislative debate dealing with one of Burns' proposals faced fierce opposition from other messengers. 'Is there anything significant to be gained by simply knowing how much money certain people make?" John Piwetz, pastor of Crossroads Baptist Church in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, said during a June 11 debate on the floor of the convention. "It would inevitably generate disagreements, envy and division.' 'I've learned that what matters more than transparency is integrity," Piwetz said. "Publishing salaries is not a solution, it only causes more issues.' Piwetz was speaking against a proposal from Burns to amend a new SBC Business and Financial Plan. The SBC Executive Committee, which is the denomination's administrative arm, put forward a new Business and Financial Plan this year for messengers to adopt. Executive Committee staff said this new version is a step toward greater transparency. But Burns saw the plan as a farce, and he tried to amend it. 'They did it in such a way to try to … take the bullet out of the chamber of those who are pushing for more transparency," Burns said in an interview prior to the June 11 floor debate. Ultimately, messengers strongly rejected Burns' proposed change and adopted the new Business and Financial Plan as presented by the Executive Committee. "I'm disappointed, but this isn't the end of the world," Burns said. "What I'm excited about is going back to Travelers Rest. … We have a lot of work to do at our church." Burns' motivation for his advocacy across the SBC started with his experience at his small-town church. Burns became the pastor at FBC Travelers Rest in 2023 after a ministry career that included seven years serving as a missionary in central Asia. But he long knew of FBC Travelers Rest from his grandparents, who had been longtime members there. There are two members at FBC Travelers Rest who have been there for 70 years, since their baptisms in May 1955. Other members are descendants of the forbearers who founded the church in 1913. 'They have been faithfully giving to this church and faithfully giving to the Cooperative Program,' Burns said. 'There's a gravity there for responsibility with our money. As pastor, I feel a sense of responsibility.' Since Burns' appointment and the addition at around the same time of members like Tweedy, the congregation has been more engaged with SBC news and governance concerns. For this year's convention in Dallas and last year's in Indianapolis, FBC Travelers Rest has sent more messengers than it typically has. Meanwhile, the same virtues have guided the congregation to re-examine its own financial practices. 'Some of the newer members were thinking, 'Hey, we need to be better stewards of what we're actually giving to the Cooperative Program, and making sure that money is being used properly,'' Tweedy said. The church formed a study group to review potential changes to the church's giving to national Southern Baptist ministries. That study group gave a report in April, and the congregation waited to make any final decisions until Burns and Tweedy report back from Dallas. Historically, 10% of FBC Travelers Rest's budget has gone toward the Cooperative Program, which in 2024 totaled $11,508. Now, the church is considering separating out that 10% share and selectively giving to some SBC entities and withholding from others. This model of targeted giving to certain entities is gaining popularity, and recent policy changes at the state level are allowing more churches to do that. There has been growing distrust toward certain entities in the wake of different controversies, causing churches to carefully consider whether their giving is consistent with their values. One example is that more churches are withholding giving to the SBC Executive Committee due to legal fees the committee is paying for abuse-related court battles. 'We're living in this moment where authority is being decentralized in some ways,' Burns said. 'The gatekeepers aren't gatekeeping in the same ways.' Related: What Southern Baptist budget debate says about denomination's precarious funding Elements of these deliberations in Dallas echo those of the 2019 and 2021 SBC annual meetings following a recommendation for financial accountability introduced by Morris Chapman, former chief executive for the SBC Executive Committee. 'It is our desire that we who are administrators and executives … be just as trustworthy and as honest as those serving in the field giving a report to us,' Chapman said at the 2019 meeting in Birmingham, Alabama. 'This year, the light has shined on our cooperative work in ways that revealed our need for reform.' Two years later, the SBC Executive Committee proposed changes to the Business and Financial Plan but faced fierce opposition, including from prominent Southern Baptists who today are top executives at SBC entities. Many were concerned that the proposal gave the SBC Executive Committee too much authority over other entities and their compliance with financial guidelines. The merit of that proposal aside, the fundamental concerns behind it are more prescient than ever. Cooperative Program giving has decreased by 6%, or $12.9 million, since the 2021-22 fiscal year, and many entities have reduced staffing totals since then. Also, the SBC Executive Committee, North American Mission Board, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary have faced scrutiny for separation agreements between those entities and former executives who resigned, some in scandal. Southern Baptists have often wondered in those cases how much severance the entities paid those ousted executives. Amid this turmoil, Burns' congregation at FBC Travelers Rest has responded differently. Tweedy said some of his fellow parishioners think it's simplest for the church to leave the SBC altogether. Though sympathetic to that unease, Tweedy and Burns support a more balanced strategy. For example, the church can potentially change its giving practices to the national convention without jeopardizing its ability to send messengers to the SBC annual meetings and to continue to advocate for policy changes. To Tweedy, the best way to honor the church's legacy of financial support for the SBC is not to give up. 'Our folks have been giving faithfully for decades,' Tweedy said, 'and it would be irresponsible of us just to take our ball and go home.' Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at ladams@ or on social media @liamsadams. This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Southern Baptist Convention: Pastor fights for financial accountability
