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Chelsea Football Club owner Todd Boley has threatened to block the Telegraph’s £550m sale by offering to help finance the takeover of the 169-year-old conservative British national newspaper.
The U.S. billionaire has been in talks with Redbird IMI in recent weeks about potentially getting involved in a deal, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Sources said Boley’s involvement could be in tandem with or in place of ongoing talks with US media executive Dovid Efne, who has been in exclusive talks to buy Telegraph for more than a month. He said that there is.
Two people familiar with the matter said Boley had held talks with Efne’s team to explore cooperation, but Chelsea’s owner wanted to proceed on his own. Redbird IMI does not intend to do business with a new bidder until the exclusivity period with Efne expires, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
Mr. Bohley, co-founder and CEO of Eldridge Industries, has invested in a wide range of industries from financial services to technology. He is best known in the UK as part-owner of Chelsea FC, but in the US he also owns a stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.
“He is trying to get involved,” one person familiar with the matter said, adding that Mr. Efne, publisher of the New York Sun, was in exclusive negotiations. “Boley is engaged in the conversation with interest.”
Questions have been raised in recent weeks about whether Efne will be able to complete the deal ahead of the next deadline before Christmas, given the lack of clear financial backing. An additional month has been given to raise the funds needed for a bid at the end of November.
A person familiar with Efne’s bid told the Financial Times last month that there was “strong momentum” in the funding consortium and that “dozens of funders are involved in these discussions between debt and equity sources. “I’m doing it,” he said.
Sources said former Conservative Prime Minister Nadhim Zahawi had also talked about investor support for the consortium.
Robbie Warshaw and The Lane Group are advising on the sale.
Mr Boley’s involvement is the latest in a complex 18-month search for a permanent owner of the Telegraph, a centre-right newspaper which lost control after its original owners, the Berkeley family, defaulted on inflated repayments in the summer of 2023. The development is as follows. Debts owed to lender Lloyds Banking Group.
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Lloyds sold the newspaper that autumn to Redbird IMI, an Abu Dhabi-backed investment group. Earlier this year, the British government vetoed the ownership of Britain’s leading newspapers by a state-backed foreign investor over concerns about its ownership.
Mr. Efne was then chosen as the preferred bidder in the subsequent auction process, when he outbid rival bidders such as Sir Maurice Saatchi and Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild.
Redbird IMI and Boley declined to comment. Efne could not be reached for comment.
