The Barclay family officially regained control of the Telegraph newspaper group on Monday, after an Abu Dhabi-backed consortium helped pay off its £1.2bn debt to Lloyds Banking Group, although the fund’s planned takeover still requires the UK government’s blessing.
Lloyds said on Monday that it had received the money it was owed, after it seized control of the group and put its Telegraph and Spectator titles up for sale after a prolonged dispute over debts racked up by its owners, the Barclays.
“We are always keen to work constructively with customers who get into difficulty with their repayments to reach an amicable solution,” a spokesperson for the bank said. “We’d like to thank all parties for their role in reaching this point.”
The transfer of funds meant that a court hearing that was due to be held in the British Virgin Islands on Monday, which could have liquidated a Barclay family holding company and scuppered the deal, did not go ahead.
The removal of Lloyds as a creditor removes one key obstacle to a high-profile takeover that restores control of the Telegraph newspapers and the Spectator political magazine to the Barclays acting in partnership with the Abu Dhabi-backed investment vehicle RedBird IMI.
RedBird IMI agreed to pay off the family’s debts and had been set a deadline of Monday to give the money to Lloyds.
The next step is intended to be a debt-for-equity swap that will result in RedBird IMI, run by the former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, converting its loans into shares and taking control of the group.
However, the transaction remains on hold, after the British government intervened to prevent completion while the media regulator Ofcom investigates whether the takeover would affect freedom of expression and plurality of views in UK media and the Competition and Markets Authority looks at any competition issues.
While the Barclays are technically the owners again, for the moment, governance sits with a new board of independent directors, and RedBird IMI is effectively the proprietor until Ofcom and the CMA report their findings on 26 January.
RedBird IMI is backed by Shekih Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE’s record on media freedom has come under scrutiny since the potential deal to take control was announced, and a number of Tories and MPs, including Lord Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, have expressed concerns about the influential right-leaning paper being controlled by the Gulf state.
The auction for the Telegraph group, which is off now the debts have been paid, had also attracted interest from the Daily Mail owner, DMGT, the Belgian publisher Mediahuis, and the hedge fund founder Paul Marshall and the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský.
