A group of North American financiers led by a low-profile, British-born conservative publisher have emerged as a serious bidder for the UK publication The Telegraph, according to two people with knowledge of the bid.
Dovid Efune, publisher of the New York Sun, made his pitch Wednesday to RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed fund that has been forced by the British government to unload the publication over concerns over foreign influence in the domestic press.
The operatic sale of a publication that is a central pillar of the Conservative Party has been widely covered in the British press, with two bidders widely reported: Paul Marshall, the knighted financier and funder of the populist right-wing broadcaster GB News, who just purchased the Spectator from RedBird IMI and is working with the American tycoon Ken Griffin; and a regional UK publisher, David Montgomery’s National World, which publishes the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post.
The Spectator and Telegraph, both storied British media assets, came on the block last year after the Barclay family failed to pay its debts. RedBird IMI paid £600 million to acquire both. One person working on the deal said the sellers are heartened by the bids and hope to do better than breaking even, having unloaded the Spectator for £100 million. “They just wanted to get shot of us for the highest price,” longtime Spectator Chairman Andrew Neil wrote on X this week.
Efune and his banker, James Lindsay of the boutique dealmaker Liontree, presented the bid in London today. Their financial backers include US investment funds Oaktree and Hudson Bay Capital; the family office of hedge-fund manager and philanthropist Michael Leffell; and the investment arm of the Canadian developer Beedie, one person familiar with the bid said.
Efune, who has been described as British-born, has roots in the American Jewish press. He was hired in 2008 as the editor-in-chief of the Algemeiner Journal, a Yiddish-language weekly that had fallen out of circulation, and which he revived in English and led until 2021, the year he purchased the New York Sun from its founding editor, Seth Lipsky.
