Frazer to launch public interest probe into Telegraph sale
The culture secretary will on Thursday launch a probe into the takeover of The Daily Telegraph by a state-backed Abu Dhabi-based fund.
Sky News has learnt that Lucy Frazer plans to issue a Public Interest Intervention Notice (PIIN) that will trigger an inquiry by Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority into RedBird IMI’s prospective ownership of the newspaper within hours.
Sources said there was a small chance that the PIIN’s publication could be delayed until Friday, but was “overwhelmingly likely” to be issued today.
The PIIN will not prevent Lloyds Banking Group receiving a £1.16bn loan repayment – funded by RedBird IMI – from the Barclay family, the long-standing owners of the Telegraph and Spectator magazine, according to one City source.
Ms Frazer’s move will kickstart a months-long process which will either result in the Telegraph becoming part of a fund part-owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family and owner of Manchester City, or reignite an auction of two of the country’s most influential newspapers.
On Wednesday, Lloyds wrote to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to notify officials that the Barclay family will repay a £1.16bn loan to it in the coming days.
The notice – which had been demanded by Ms Frazer last week – means that the funds will be transferred to Lloyds as early as Friday, or at the start of next week.
That would trigger the dissolution of a court hearing in the British Virgin Islands to liquidate a Barclay family company tied to the newspaper’s ownership, and temporarily put the Barclays back in control of their shares in the broadsheet title.
Lucy Frazer
However, a formal hold separate notice, which had been considered by Whitehall to guarantee the independence of the Telegraph during the PIIN process, is not expected to form part of Thursday’s announcement, sources said.
Instead, an agreement will be put in place to ensure the independent governance of the titles during the process, they added.
Lloyds wrote to government officials last Thursday to say it would support the retention of a trio of independent directors, led by the Openreach chairman Mike McTighe, while a public interest inquiry is carried out.
RedBird IMI, which is led by the former CNN president Jeff Zucker, intends to take control of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph by converting a £600m chunk of its loan to the Barclays into equity.
The fund’s offer to fund the loan redemption has circumvented an auction of the Telegraph titles which has drawn interest from a range of bidders.
Last week, Mr Zucker, who Sky News revealed was spearheading the deal, told the Financial Times that competing bidders were “slinging mud”.
“There’s a reason that people are slinging mud and throwing darts – [it’s] because they want to own these assets,” he told the newspaper.
“And they have their own media assets to try to hurt us.”
The battle for control of The Daily Telegraph has rapidly turned into a complex commercial and political row which has raised tensions between the DCMS and the Foreign Office over Britain’s receptiveness to foreign investment.
Prospective bidders led by the hedge fund billionaire and GB News shareholder Sir Paul Marshall have been agitating for the launch of a PIIN.
Sky News revealed last week that Ed Richards, the former boss of media regulator Ofcom, is acting as a lobbyist for RedBird IMI through Flint Global, which was co-founded by Sir Simon Fraser, former Foreign Office permanent secretary.
The Telegraph auction, which has also drawn interest from the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere and National World, a London-listed local newspaper publisher, has now been paused until next month.
The original bid deadline had been shifted from 28 November to 10 December to take account of the possibility that Lloyds might be repaid in full by the Barclay family by December 1.
That bid deadline is now likely to be cancelled.
The Barclays have made a series of increased offers in recent months to head off an auction of the newspapers they bought nearly 20 years ago, raising its proposal last month to £1bn.
Until June, the newspapers were chaired by Aidan Barclay – the nephew of Sir Frederick Barclay, the octogenarian who along with his late twin Sir David engineered the takeover of the Telegraph in 2004.
Lloyds had been locked in talks with the Barclays for years about refinancing loans made to them by HBOS prior to that bank’s rescue during the 2008 banking crisis.
A government spokesman declined to comment.
An arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy, triggered by recent panic over Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, risks amplifying the existential dangers of superintelligence, according to one of the “godfathers” of AI.
Canadian machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, author of the first International AI Safety Report to be presented at an international AI summit in Paris next week, warns unchecked investment in computational power for AI without oversight is dangerous.
“The effort is going into who’s going to win the race, rather than how do we make sure we are not going to build something that blows up in our face,” Mr Bengio says.
He warns that military and economic races “result in cutting corners on ethics, cutting corners on responsibility and on safety. It’s unavoidable”.
Mr Bengio worked on neural networks and machine learning, the software architecture that underpins modern AI models.
He is in London, along with other AI pioneers to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the most prestigious global award for engineering, in recognition of AI and its potential.
He’s enthusiastic about its benefits for society, but the pivot away from AI regulation by Donald Trump‘s White House and frantic competition among big tech companies for more powerful AI models is a worrying shift.
‘Superhuman systems becoming more powerful’
“We are building systems that are more and more powerful; becoming superhuman in some dimensions,” he says.
“As these systems become more powerful, they also become extraordinarily more valuable, economically speaking.
“So the magnitude of, ‘wow, this is going to make me a lot of money’ is motivating a lot of people. And of course, when you want to sell products, you don’t want to talk about the risks.”
But not all the “godfathers” of AI are so concerned.
Take Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, also in London to share in the QEPrize.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI scientist
“We have been deluded into thinking that large language models are intelligent, but really, they’re not,” he says.
“We don’t have machines that are nearly as smart as a house cat, in terms of understanding the physical world.”
Within three to five years, Mr LeCun predicts, AI will have some aspects of human-level intelligence. Robots, for example, that can perform tasks they’ve not been programmed or trained to do.
Read more:
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But, he argues, rather than make the world less safe, open-source AI models such as DeepSeek – a chatbot developed by a Chinese company that rivals the best of America’s big tech with a tenth of the computing power – demonstrates no one will dominate for long.
“If the US decides to clam up when it comes to AI for geopolitical reasons, or, commercial reasons, then you’ll have innovation someplace else in the world. DeepSeek showed that,” he says.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering prize is awarded each year to engineers whose discoveries have, or promise to have, the greatest impact on the world.
Previous recipients include the pioneers of photovoltaic cells in solar panels, wind turbine technology and neodymium magnets found in hard drives, and electric motors.
Science minister Lord Vallance, who chairs the QEPrize foundation, says he is alert to the potential risks of AI.
Organisations such as the UK’s new AI Safety Institute are designed to foresee and prevent the potential harms AI “human-like” intelligence might bring.
Science minister Lord Vallance
But he is less concerned about one nation or company having a monopoly on AI.
“I think what we’ve seen in the last few weeks is it’s much more likely that we’re going to have many companies in this space, and the idea of single-point dominance is rather unlikely,” he says.
The Treasury Select Committee has sent a formal notice to HM Revenue & Customs demanding answers to critical questions about how it has been enforcing trade sanctions on Russia, following a Sky News investigation into the government department.
Last month Sky News reported that while HMRC had issued six fines in relation to sanction-breaking since 2022, it would not name the firms sanctioned or provide any further detail on what they did wrong. HMRC also admitted it had no idea how many investigations it was currently carrying out into sanction-breaking.
The admissions raised questions about the robustness of Britain’s trade sanctions regime, described by government ministers as the toughest in British history.
Money blog: Now we know why Guinness tastes worse in the UK
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How robust are UK-Russia sanctions?
While the UK has introduced rules preventing the export of certain goods to Russia, banned items are still flowing into the country via third countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Some suspect that part of the reason these flows continue is that HMRC is not enforcing the rules as robustly as it could be.
Following Sky News’ investigation, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee (TSC), Dame Meg Hiller, has written a letter to the chief executive of HMRC, Sir Jim Harra, with 10 questions about HMRC’s conduct in the enforcement of sanctions.
Among the questions, the TSC chair asks: “Why doesn’t HMRC publish information on breaches in sanctions in a similar way to the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), which gives the details of the company, how it breached sanctions and the amount of penalty issued?”
Many other countries around the world – most notably the United States – routinely “name and shame” those who break sanctions, in part as a deterrent and in part to inform other businesses about what it takes to break the rules. But HMRC instead protects the privacy of those who break sanctions.
The TSC has been scrutinising the sanctions regime in recent months, examining loopholes in the legislation and its enforcement. HMRC has been asked to respond to the letter by 17 February.
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