News that the government may intervene in the extraordinary takeover saga of Telegraph Media Group is welcome. The culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, announced on Wednesday that the sale to an Abu Dhabi-backed fund may be referred to regulators on public interest grounds – which, compared to previous newspaper sales, is a positive sign of proactive scrutiny.
When a former KGB spy, Alexander Lebedev, bought the Independent in 2010 he faced a small competition review in Ireland and cheers in the newsroom before giving a speech on press freedom. Much later, he was put on a Ukraine sanctions list following Vladimir Putin’s invasion. And when an initially unknown investor with “strong links” to Saudi Arabia took a minority stake in the Independent in 2019, the reaction was decidedly more mixed – but the government somehow missed a deadline to investigate it much further.
But does this herald a new era of greater transparency over media ownership and concerns for press freedom? Probably not: the referral is much more likely to have been driven by the business-as-usual politics of powerful interests seeking to influence our government and fourth estate.
Frazer, a successful insolvency lawyer-turned-politician who has argued against lawsuits used by the rich to deter journalists, deserves credit. As a conservative she finds herself in a difficult place: caught between the demands of capitalism on one side and an increasingly powerful voice on the right wing of the party on the other.
Telegraph Media Group titles are only up for sale because Lloyds bank grew tired of holding more than £1bn in unpaid debts run up by their owner, the Barclay family, and effectively repossessed the titles in June.
Earlier this week, a joint venture called RedBird IMI announced that it would pay off all £1.2bn of debts owed to Lloyds in return for ownership of the newspaper titles. Although the offer is led by a former head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and backed by the US private equity fund RedBird Capital, documents lodged in the US and seen by the Times suggest that 75% of the joint venture vehicle is owned by International Media Investments, funded by Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan – not just the owner of Manchester City football club, but also deputy prime minister and brother to the president of the United Arab Emirates. The cash-rich emirates are also an increasingly powerful force, hosting a global investment summit earlier this year and Cop28, which begins next week.
Cue outrage over what some Tory MPs have called a “risk to our national security”, citing Abu Dhabi’s record on press freedom and position on Israel. It is worth noting that much of the outrage seems to echo the legal advice commissioned by a rival bidder, Sir Paul Marshall, a major investor in GB News and wannabe media mogul of the libertarian right. Marshall has also made it very clear how keen he is to own the Telegraph newspaper.
There is a whiff of nationalism or something worse in some of the objections to a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family taking control of a national title. And yet this should not obscure the fact that there are genuine concerns about any nation state owning a British newspaper, let alone one with a harsh view of journalists at home. The Reporters without Borders report on the UAE makes grim reading: dissenters are persecuted and journalists have been harassed and extradited.
Global investors have snapped up many landmark British assets. Yet no other business, even football clubs, has the same power to influence public opinion as the media. Anyone arguing that no one reads or cares about a “dead tree” newspaper should ask why so many very rich men still want to own one.
It has been interesting to see how many stories the Telegraph itself is now writing about its potential new ownership – even a leader this week – now that it seems very unlikely that its previous owner will keep hold of it.
RedBird, from a land where disclosure rules are far more onerous, has already insisted that IMI would be a “passive investor”. If the debt swap goes ahead it will come down to Frazer to decide whether Sheikh Mansour and the state of Abu Dhabi can be trusted in the same way Rupert Murdoch was when he promised that the Times would have full independence (and look how that turned out).
Lloyds, keen to please its shareholders by announcing the unexpected full repayment of the debt, believes the culture secretary should only intervene once the debt is paid off and then swapped for equity. Then it can exit stage left from this embarrassing relic of its Bank of Scotland money-spaffing past.
This is a complicated story full of very rich or once very rich men and a title not many Guardian readers have time for. Yet there is an important principle at stake here.
In his speech, Lebedev said journalism “should be a source of light, shining into the dark areas where the powerful and corrupt want to keep things hidden”. Too often, ownership of a newspaper is one of the darkest areas. The Telegraph’s motto – “Was, is, and will be” – may speak to its place at the heart of postwar British conservatism, but it also speaks to a society that should, but doesn’t always learn from the mistakes of the past.
Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist and author of You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty
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