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Media
INM shareholders back Indy saving restructure
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 30 November 2009
Shareholders in Dublin-based Independent News & Media, which own the The Independent and Independent On Sunday, have voted in favour of a restructuring plan which the company’s management say should turn round the struggling newspaper owner’s fortunes. The plan includes proposals to issue new shares in the company to raise new funds, as well as selling off one of its South African companies.
The vote is most important because it safeguards, for the time being at least, the future of INM’s daily and Sunday UK-based broadsheet. As previously reported, one of INM’s key shareholders, Denis O’Brien, has spent much of the year trying to force the company to offload the Indy, which has already slashed its running costs and given up its London HQ to share offices with the Daily Mail.
In the current climate, INM offloading The Indu would almost certainly have led to the broadsheet’s closure, the impact of which would have been to further destabilise the British newspaper market, and may be resulting in other closures.
But INM’s biggest shareholder, Tony O’Reilly, remains committed to his company’s UK paper, and he and his son Gavin, the company’s CEO, argue it would be costlier to close it than keep it open. Votes at one shareholder meeting earlier this month, and two EGMs on Thursday last week, mean that the O’Reilly led restructuring plans that safeguard the future of the Indy have now been approved.
The title, therefore, will definitely see it into 2010, which at one point earlier this year many commentators doubted.
