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Alexander Lebedev buys the Independent for £1
The former KGB agent safeguards the papers’ future and sets up a foundation to support them
Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev would appear to know his way around a pound shop. After paying £1 for the Evening Standard last year, he has now bought the Independent and Independent on Sunday for the same price from Irish publisher Independent News & Media.
Talks over a deal have taken more than a year, but an agreement that will safeguard the paper's future has finally been struck.
Lebedev's company, Independent Print Limited (IPL), will pay £1 for the titles but will also receive £9.25m over the next 10 months from the current owners, Irish publisher Independent News & Media (INM). Last year the Independent titles and website made a loss of £12.4m.
Staff at the Independent are said to have raised a cheer when the news was announced. Ledebev's son, Evgeny, will be handed the job of chairman at IPL.
The paper will retain its offices at the Daily Mail complex in Kensington and will also continue to be printed by Trinity Mirror, its former owner.
There has been speculation that the Indie could become the first free national paper, following the path of the Evening Standard, which Lebedev made free after taking it over in 2009. However, it is understood that the former KGB agent assured Gordon Brown that he had no such plans when they met recently.
Lebedev also announced that he was creating a not-for-profit organisation called the Novaya Independent Media Foundation, in association with former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, to "finance global media projects".
He said it would be used to protect his UK titles and the Russian paper Novaya Gazeta.
He said: "We hope that other philanthropists will also be interested in maintaining quality journalism to protect freedom of speech and encourage investigative reporting to promote greater transparency in society."
Simon Kelner, the titles' managing director and editor-in-chief will remain in place, although he has abandoned his plans to install Rod Liddle as editor of one or both of the papers.
Instead, the Independent and Independent on Sunday are expected to keep faith with their editors, Roger Alton and former Guardian journalist John Mullin.
The deal must be approved by the Irish competition authorities but is likely to be completed in May 2010. ·
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The 'British' newspaper industry is a laregly foreign owned, hugely biased, anti-British, communist/feminist/islamic/capitalist mish mash of a joke. Openly promoting multi-culturalism as a way of destroying everyone's culture and communising us as Lenin and The Frankfurt School marxists advocated. Ain't going to happen. No wonder the Independent has been so scurrilous in its disgusting attacks on the BNP. It's dying a death and become little more than a communist plaything, propaganda peddler and hopeless charity case. Its journalists don't seem to care what they print, they just publish whatever they are told by whomever owns their sorry collective arses.