Deal to promote Telegraph and Spectator to UAE fund referred to UK media watchdog

Get the free Morning Headlines e mail for information from our reporters internationally

Signal as much as our free Morning Headlines e mail

An Abu Dhabi-backed takeover of The Each day Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator has been referred to media watchdog Ofcom.

The Barclay household have been hoping to promote the publications to a consortium. However on Thursday, tradition secretary Lucy Frazer issued a public curiosity intervention discover (PIIN) into the bid.

On Wednesday, 18 Conservative MPs wrote to deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, urging him to make use of nationwide safety powers to evaluation the potential sale.

Ministers had been requested to intervene after RedBird IMI, an funding fund owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, vice-president of the UAE, reached a deal to buy the publications. The MPs mentioned they believed that the proposed transaction offered “a really actual potential nationwide safety menace”.

The backbenchers mentioned ministers shouldn’t be “railroaded” into clearing the change of possession and will as a substitute pause the deal to evaluation its impression on Britain’s safety and press freedom.

Ofcom is now being requested to research whether or not the deal would breach necessities together with “the necessity for the correct presentation of stories and free expression of opinion in newspapers”.

Highlighting human-rights charity Amnesty Worldwide’s issues over the “severe implications” for media freedom if the deal went forward, the objecting MPs mentioned the sale may “imperil these publications’ means to report freely, which clearly poses a nationwide safety danger”.

When requested to answer the letter, RedBird pointed to remarks by head of the fund Jeff Zucker, who informed the Telegraph on Tuesday that issues over the takeover had been “misplaced”.

“I’m right here to say that the editorial independence of the Telegraph is assured,” Mr Zucker mentioned.

Within the final two months the Barclay household has lodged a collection of proposals to repay roughly £1bn of debt it owes the excessive road financial institution, with most of these tabled at a big low cost to its face worth.

Till June, the newspapers had been chaired by Aidan Barclay, the nephew of Sir Frederick Barclay, the octogenarian who together with late brother Sir David engineered the takeover of the Telegraph 19 years in the past.