A TRIO of left-leaning businessmen look set to take control of Le Mondeafter their bid for the iconic paper was approved by its supervisory board yesterday.
The successful consortium of Matthieu Pigasse, a Lazard banker; Pierre Bergé, the former business partner of Yves Saint Laurent; and Xavier Niel, a telecoms billionaire, has agreed to invest some €100 million in return for the heavily indebted daily.
The outcome was widely expected since last Friday, when Le Mondejournalists voted by 90 per cent in favour of the Pigasse-Bergé-Niel bid.
A rival consortium of France Telecom, Claude Perdriel (owner of Le Nouvel Observateur magazine) and Spanish media group Prisa pulled out of the race early yesterday as a result of the overwhelming rejection by staff.
The paper’s journalists, who have had a controlling interest since the 1950s, said they chose the Pigasse-Bergé-Niel bid because it was “the most coherent proposition” and offered better guarantees of editorial independence.
While staff will lose some of their power in the deal, it is thought they may retain their cherished right of veto over the choice of editor.
The battle for Le Monde, the influential house journal of France's elite, has become a closely followed saga over recent weeks. The victory for Mr Pigasse, Mr Bergé and Mr Niel will be seen as a defeat for President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is believed to have been against three businessmen with known connections to the opposition Socialist Party taking the paper's helm two years before he faces re-election.
Mr Sarkozy summoned Éric Fottorino, the paper’s publisher, to the Elysée Palace earlier this month to discuss the impending takeover, with the president reportedly threatening to withhold state subsidies to the newspaper’s printing plant if the trio took control. The Elysée dismissed reports that it was seeking to influence the recapitalisation as “grotesque rumours”.
Mr Pigasse once worked in the cabinets of the socialist former government ministers Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, while Mr Bergé is also known to be sympathetic to the party. The third member of the team, Mr Niel, is a successful telecoms entrepreneur who started his career by investing in sex shops and chatline services on Minitel, a French forerunner to the internet.
France Telecom’s involvement in the rival bid raised eyebrows, as the company is 26 per cent owned by the French state, but the company denied intervening at anyone’s request.
Founded by Hubert Beuve-Méry at a time when many French papers were deemed to be discredited by their reporting under the German occupation, the left-leaning Le Monde takes pride in its rigour, seriousness and independence. The paper’s circulation, at 320,000, has fallen by about 25 per cent in a decade.
Without new funds, a spokeswoman said, it would be bankrupt by the end of June.