The Axel Springer publishing house has reached an agreement to take over the British Telegraph Media Group (TMG). As the company announced on Friday, the purchase price was 575 million British pounds, which is about 662 million euros. The seller is the investment company RedBird IMI. With this transaction, the 171-year-old Daily Telegraph and its Sunday edition Sunday Telegraph will become the property of the Berlin-based group.
Axel Springer's CEO, Mathias Döpfner, described the acquisition as the fulfillment of a long-held plan; the publisher had unsuccessfully tried to buy the title group about 20 years ago. Döpfner emphasized that they want to develop the Telegraph into the leading bourgeois-conservative medium in the English-speaking world, especially focusing on growth in the US market. The newspaper is traditionally considered closely linked to the British establishment and the Conservative Party.
The sale marks the end of a lengthy bidding war and regulatory reviews. Previously, other interested parties, including the owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, as well as a consortium around the entrepreneur Dovid Efune, had shown interest in the media group. The British government had intervened in the past to limit the influence of foreign states on the domestic press, which prevented an original bid involving participation from the United Arab Emirates, among other things.
