Who owns Tortoise Media and who is backing its bid to take over the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer?
The mystery over who exactly is funding the deal is among the issues causing concern for Guardian and Observer journalists.
Should the deal go through it would bring The Observer under the umbrella of a company whose owners include venture capitalists, a South African chicken restaurant executive, heirs to a clothing fortune and an art curator.
Tortoise’s biggest shareholder is editor James Harding, followed by the billionaire Thomson family
By far the biggest single shareholder is Tortoise’s editor himself, James Harding. A former editor of The Times newspaper and director of BBC News, Harding holds 32.5% of shares in Tortoise Media Ltd and is the only person identified on its Companies House page as a person with significant control.
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The company has three directors besides Harding: Soho House founder and owner Nick Jones, former Sony Music Entertainment executive Ceci Kurzman and Tortoise co-founder and former US ambassador to the UK Matthew Barzun.
Barzun owns 3.8% of the company directly and another 2.8% jointly with his wife, art curator Brooke Barzun. The former diplomat also owns local Kentucky publication Louisville Magazine.
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The second largest Tortoise shareholder after Harding is Woodbridge Investments Corporation which holds 16.1% of shares. It is the investment vehicle for the Thomson family, who are majority owners of Thomson Reuters and are led by Thomson Reuters chairman David. Forbes puts the wealth of the family at $71.4bn.
The Thomsons – descendants of Roy Thomson, the former Times, Sunday Times and Scotsman proprietor – are no strangers to media investments, having acquired Reuters in 2007 and taken full control of Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper in 2015, five years after purchasing a majority stake.
The third biggest stake in Tortoise is held by London-based hedge fund Lansdowne Partners, which owns 11.78% of the equity. Lansdowne contributed the largest part of a £10m series A funding deal Tortoise struck in early 2022.
It is followed by Yellowwoods Associates, a company wholly owned by former Nando’s chief financial officer Leslie Perlman and which owns 5.52% of the business. The next biggest shareholder is Joseph Schull (4.42%), who appears to be a co-founder and managing partner at private equity fund Corten Capital.
Holding 3.85% of the shares is Tortoise co-founder and former publisher Katie Vanneck-Smith, who has since left the outlet to become chief executive of Hearst UK.
Tortoise Media has four different types of shares: Series Seed, Growth, Ordinary and Ordinary B. Only the Growth shares differ significantly from the other share classes in that they, uniquely, do not entitle their holder to dividends or to vote at company meetings. Vanneck-Smith is the only holder of Growth shares.
Two different billionaire heirs to clothes retailer H&M also separately hold stakes in the news start-up. Karl-Johan Perssons, the chairman and former chief executive of H&M, owns 2.83% of Tortoise through his private investment business Philian AB. His brother, Tom Persson, holds a further 2.36% of Tortoise through his company, Co-made Sthlm.
Other notable shareholders include:
- Cristina Stenbeck, the lead investor and executive chair of Swedish tech investment business Kinnevik (2.6% of Tortoise Media)
- Alex Fitzgibbons: Chairman and majority shareholder of high-end events business Fait Accompli (2.3%)
- Bernard Mensah: chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch International and president of international at Bank of America (2.3%)
- Venture capital firm Localglobe, which says it has given seed funding to businesses including Zoopla, Wise and Citymapper (1.53%)
- Patrick Healy, chief executive officer of private equity firm Hellman & Friedman (1.53%)
- Fraser Hardie, a senior advisor at PR firm Teneo and the former executive chairman of Teneo UK (0.76%)
- Danny Rimer, a partner at venture capital firm Index Ventures (0.36%)
- Liz Moseley, managing director of Good Housekeeping and a former editor at Tortoise (0.21%)
- Guardian Saturday magazine editor Merope Mills (0.18%)
- Demos chief executive and former Huffpost UK editor Polly Curtis (0.04%)
A selection of current and previous Tortoise staff also hold a small numbers of shares in the business, including head of Think Ins Mark St Andrew (0.02%), reporter Ella Hill (0.01%), former Tortoise (and now GB News) video operator Connor Robins (0.01%), former member engagement manager Louise Trelles-Tvede (0.01%) and former assistant editor James Wilson (0.004%).
According to figures seen by Press Gazette, The Observer newspaper had revenue of £16.4m in the year up to the end of August and directly attributable costs of £13.4m. The Observer does, however, share many costs with The Guardian.
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