Mark Kleinman i s Sky News’ City Editor and is the man who gets the Square Mile talking in his weekly City AM column. This week he tackles the Telegraph bid, Mike Ashley’s failed Boohoo approach and an oil deal in the North Sea I suspect you’d have got long odds on January 1 on the auction of The Daily Telegraph remaining wholly unresolved at the end of this calendar year. In that sense, the sale of one of Britain’s most influential right-wing newspaper groups ranks high on my list of the most surprising M&A (non) outcomes of 2024.
Not only is the destiny of the title and its Sunday sister newspaper still unclear, but there looks to be a growing likelihood that – in the best traditions of a Fleet Street editor tearing up their front page minutes before it is due to go to press – the sale process will shift yet again in an entirely different direction. Much of the explanation for that lies in the fact that IMI, the Abu Dhabi-based vehicle which is owed much of the £500m of outstanding debt used to repay the Barclay family’s debt to Lloyds Banking Group more than a year ago, has been determined to turn a profit. That has led both RedBird IMI and its advisers at Raine Group and Robey Warshaw into a corporate finance cul-de-sac.
Exclusivity was signed with Dovid Efune, publisher of the New York Sun, in mid-October, and then extended before coming to an end earlier this month with no deal in sight. Efune has struggled to assemble a stable coalition of financial back.
