Daily Mail chief to pay £35m for Telegraph stake
Sky News has learnt that Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail and General Trust is to fork out just under £35m for a shareholding of about 10% in the Telegraph titles, implying an equity value of roughly £350m.
Banking sources said that Goldman Sachs had been enlisted to provide advice to DMGT on the investment.
A deal is expected to be struck imminently, according to insiders.
RedBird Capital, the US-based investment firm, confirmed last week that it was exercising an option to take majority control of the newspapers, with Abu Dhabi state-backed vehicle IMI expected to acquire the maximum 15% stake 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, it faces continued opposition from parliamentarians.
Dovid Efune, 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.
RedBird IMI paid £600m in 2023 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.
The Spectator was then 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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
29 minutes ago
- BBC News
'I have nightmares about potholes' - Kent Council roads boss
A Kent council cabinet member said he has "nightmares about potholes" as it aims to invest millions into fixing the County Council says it wants to invest £67m into roads in the region, including quick repairs on potholes and preventative measures to stop new issues from in Herne Bay this afternoon, Peter Osborne - who is responsible for highways and transport - said potholes in Kent would be fixed in order of priority, having previously claimed the council had repaired more than 12,000 said: "I have nightmares about potholes. We have all driven over them and I want them fixed." As part of the multi-million pound investment, the Reform-run council says £25m would be used on renewing and reconstructing roads, while £14m would also be sought from the Department for Transport to fund a dedicated pothole patching March, the Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey found that fixing the backlog of repairs on roads in the South East would cost about £ Sole, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrat group in Kent County Council, said residents want to "see those potholes being repaired with their own eyes".
Times
29 minutes ago
- Times
Whining about Scottish ‘austerity' is baseless, absurd and idiotic
Like Christmas and birthdays, the annual GERS festival seems to arrive sooner than you think. Has a year really passed since the last edition of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland figures was published? Why, yes it has. This year's numbers are remarkable, best accompanied by an indecently large dram of cask-strength liquor. For public spending in and for Scotland amounted to 52 per cent of Scottish GDP last year. That is lower than in France, Finland, Belgium and Austria but higher than in every other European country. Public spending in Sweden and Denmark, for instance, equals 48 per cent of GDP. In Norway, the figure is 46 per cent. Further afield, other countries with which the Scottish government sometimes likes to compare Scotland contrive to thrive with a much smaller public sector. Public spending in New Zealand is 42 per cent of GDP. This is the context in which to understand the claims made by Scottish government ministers that Scotland is once again enduring some form of 'austerity'. And the thing to understand about this whining is that it is baseless, absurd and idiotic. This is a country of Big Government. If government departments and other agencies struggle to meet their obligations despite this obvious largesse it is because they are inefficiently or incompetently run and because ministers lack the courage to say 'No' to demands for more and more spending. Mercifully, Scottish taxpayers are not required to pay for all of this. In 2024-25, £91.4 billion was raised in taxes in Scotland but government spending amounted to £117.6 billion. This is a notional deficit — notional because Scotland is part of the United Kingdom — of some £26.5 billion. That is equivalent to 11.7 per cent of GDP. John Swinney should pray to the ghost of the late Joel Barnett every night for it is his eponymous formula that grants Scotland its privileged place within the United Kingdom: a relatively wealthy part of the realm funded as though it were a poor one. By way of illustrating the scale of Scotland's deficit, it may be worthing noting that last year Zimbabwe ran a deficit equal to 10.4 per cent of GDP. Indeed, according to data compiled by the International Monetary Fund, the only independent countries running real deficits greater than Scotland's notional one are East Timor, Kiribati, the Maldives and Ukraine. At this point nationalists will customarily enter the chat to say that, look, GERS only tells us about Scotland's current fiscal position and of course an independent Scotland would do things differently. This is true. GERS offers a snapshot of the position from which an independent Scotland would begin life and GERS also makes it very clear that many things would have to be done very differently in an independent Scotland. To start with you would begin with something like £10 billion in tax increases and around another £10 billion in spending cuts. That would still leave Scotland running a deficit like most countries but it would be a manageable one of around 3 per cent of GDP. That, you will also recall, is the price of admission to the European Union. Every existing tax would doubtless be increased and new taxes created (on this front, if few others, Scotland's political class is endlessly resourceful). But to give an indication of the scale of tax hikes required, £10 billion is about half of total income tax receipts in Scotland last year. Swingeing tax increases of this sort would almost certainly encourage capital flight of a sort this country can ill afford. Just 5 per cent of Britain's top-rate tax-payers live in Scotland which is one reason why although Scotland has 8 per cent of the UK population it contributes just 6.8 per cent of income tax revenue. Tax increases of this sort, however, would only get the job half done. You would still need to cut £10 billion of public spending. That is roughly equivalent to 50 per cent of the NHS budget. Good luck winning an independence referendum on that manifesto. • The facts of life are demanding chiels. It is too often and too easily forgotten that in the years after the 2008 financial crisis Scotland's notional deficit was broadly the same as the UK's real one and, in some years and thanks to buoyant oil revenues, Scotland's relative fiscal position was marginally healthier than the UK's. This was unusual and atypical but it allowed Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon to sell independence as a financial opportunity, not, as it obviously is now, a giant leap into an enormous fiscal black hole. Even then, all lilies had to be gilded. As Sturgeon relates in her new memoir, oil prices were then high but Salmond 'spent a lot of time persuading the government economists to push their projections higher, raking them to the outer edges of credibility'. In other words, the Yes campaign suborned officials to present a fantastical vision of the riches an independent Scotland would enjoy. This is something worth remembering. The SNP are doubtless happy to win without lying but why take that risk when untruths may buttress the liberation cause? Economic self-interest does not always prevail and voters may cheerfully vote for their own impoverishment but, even so, this year's GERS festival is a reminder that the appeal of independence is for the time being strictly notional and hypothetical. That imaginary Scotland is a comfortable place to dwell but the nature of today's fiscal realities is such that even SNP politicians might be wary of asking the national question again. This is why, in the end, they are comfortable not asking it, for no amount of creative accountancy can make these sums add up.
Telegraph
29 minutes ago
- Telegraph
MoD refuses to say if Chagos deal counts toward defence spending
The Ministry of Defence has refused to say whether the Chagos Islands deal will count toward its Nato spending target. Labour ministers repeatedly faced questions over whether the £35bn agreement, described as a 'surrender deal' by critics, would be included as part of the newly announced goal of spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035. The Chagos deal was announced earlier this year as part of a large settlement with Mauritius, which claims sovereignty over the archipelago. Opponents said counting the Chagos payments towards the Nato total would undermine the credibility of the pledge, allowing ministers to claim they were spending more on defence without providing additional resources for the Armed Forces. 'Creative accounting' James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, accused the Government of 'smoke and mirrors', adding that counting the sum towards the target would be 'a total con'. He told The Telegraph: 'With the threats we face, the UK needs to urgently increase defence spending. But this needs to be actual money for our Armed Forces, not smoke and mirrors. 'If Labour were to include the cost of Chagos in their declared Nato spend, that wouldn't just be creative accounting but a total con on the British public, inflating apparent defence spending with a £35bn commitment that makes us weaker. 'Labour must come clean on whether this massive waste of taxpayer's money will be included in our Nato spend.' Asked whether the Chagos payments would count towards the Nato total, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) directed The Telegraph towards an answer given in the House of Lords by Baroness Chapman, a Foreign Office minister. She told peers: 'The payments to Mauritius will be split between the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the MoD. The Nato qualifying status of these costs will be considered in the usual way.'
