UK

Barclay family launch bid to buy back Telegraph


James Warrington
Sat, 26 August 2023 

Copies of The Daily Telegraph newspaper on a newsstand

The Barclay family have tabled a bid to regain control of Telegraph Media Group from Lloyds Banking Group.

The former owners of the newspaper group, comprising the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk, have secured backing from Middle Eastern investors to buy back roughly half the debt it owes Lloyds, Sky News reported.

The unnamed backers are said to be based in Abu Dhabi, while the offer is believed to be in the region of £500m to £600m.
This would mark a significant writeback for Lloyds, which wrote down the value of its loans to the family several years ago.

The Barclays lost control when the newspaper’s parent company was placed into receivership in June.

A formal sale process run by Goldman Sachs is due to begin in September. The Wall Street bank will also auction The Spectator magazine, which was also owned by the Barclay family.

Potential bidders for The Telegraph include Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, who is reportedly courting investors.

Any bid by his company Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), however, would be at risk of a lengthy review of its impact on media plurality that might reduce its attractiveness to Lloyds.

National World, a local newspaper group led by veteran executive David Montgomery, is to date the only party to publicly declare an interest in making a bid.

However, the Barclay family may hope a deal with them would be viewed as preferential by receivers at specialist consultancy AlixPartners, given it would avoid the risk of any protracted regulatory review.

Charlie Nunn, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, last month said there was “no need to have a rushed sales process”.

He added: “We’ve set up an independent receivership and this is all being managed totally independently from executives at Lloyds Banking Group.

“You can imagine why that’s important for us and for me personally so we aren’t involved in the decision making around how the process is being run.

“We’ve given the receivers the complete freedom to run a process with the right diligence and, from our perspective, to ensure the process is run well from a UK perspective and maximise the returns for our shareholders.”

A spokesman for the Barclay family declined to comment.