MAM
Britain’s Daily Mail to buy Telegraph Media Group for £500m
LONDON: The Daily Mail owner has barged back onto Britain’s media chessboard, striking a $654m deal to buy rival The Telegraph after months of political wrangling, failed bids and a swirl of foreign ownership fears.
Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) said it had clinched an agreement with RedBird IMI, the US–UAE consortium that had been circling the Telegraph Media Group for two years. The deal values the group at £500m ($654m) and finally ends a long spell of limbo for the storied newspaper.
The move comes barely a week after US investor RedBird Capital Partners abruptly ditched its own takeover plans, reigniting uncertainty around the Telegraph’s fate and prolonging a saga punctuated by government pushback and merger law hurdles.
DMGT, which also owns Metro and the i Paper, will enter an exclusivity period to iron out the final terms, something all parties said they “expect to happen quickly”. The company said the takeover would provide “much-needed certainty and confidence” for the paper’s staff and allow it to accelerate the Telegraph’s international expansion, with its sights trained firmly on the US.
RedBird IMI, created by RedBird Capital and Abu Dhabi’s International Media Investments, had originally agreed its own £500m deal for the group in late 2023. But the UK government, spooked by Abu Dhabi’s censorship record and eager to shield press freedoms, forced a resale and tightened laws to stop foreign state-linked players from owning British newspapers.
The May attempt would have handed RedBird a majority stake and IMI 15 per cent, another plan sunk under scrutiny from rights advocates and MPs over links to China’s sovereign wealth fund. RedBird IMI said it worked “swiftly” with DMGT to hammer out the new settlement, which will be submitted to the secretary of state in the coming days.
Founded in 1855, the Telegraph was bought by Frederick and David Barclay in 2004 for £665m. Lloyds Bank seized the paper in 2023 to recover the brothers’ debts, triggering a high-stakes auction that drew interest from hedge-fund manager Paul Marshall, owner of right-leaning channel GB News.
Now, after two years of political drama, failed suitors and regulatory interventions, the Telegraph finally has a buyer, and DMGT has fired the latest shot in Britain’s bruising newspaper wars. The industry will be watching closely, because this one promises fireworks.
