Tycoon trio wins control of Le Monde

A French Internet billionaire, a patron of the arts and a flamboyant banker won control of Le Monde newspaper Monday, despite President Nicolas Sarkozy's bid to stop them.

The trio includes Xavier Niel, 42, an Internet entrepreneur who first made his money from sex chat services and later shook up the French Internet market with cheap connection packages from his provider Free.

With him is Pierre Berge, 79, the rich partner of the late fashion guru Yves Saint-Laurent, and Matthieu Pigasse, 41, a senior figure at investment bank Lazard who owns the alternative news and culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles.

Their bid won the approval of the paper's supervisory board, 11 of whose members voted for it, a source close to the board told AFP.

Berge, Pigasse and Niel promised to let the paper's editors maintain full editorial independence and let the journalists' association keep its right to veto major decisions.

"We consider Le Monde common property," the trio said in a statement following the vote. They said they would start talks on recapitalizing the group Tuesday and complete the process by the end of September.

The leading French-language newspaper, which was founded when the Nazis were chased out of Paris in 1944, has been struggling to survive in the Internet age, so the paper's owners called for investors willing to buy into the loss-making daily and pay off its debt of around 100 million euros ($122 million).

A senior journalist at the newspaper, who asked not be named, said Le Monde staff members were mostly happy with the outcome and believed that the trio would honor their promise not to interfere editorially.

"I tend to believe what Berge and the others said, that this is the last independent paper in France and they want to keep it that way," he told AFP.

The left-of-center newspaper's search for fresh capital turned political earlier this month, when Sarkozy summoned the publisher of the daily, Eric Fottorino.

The right-wing president told him he opposed the Berge-Pigasse-Niel bid because of their ties to France's left-wing opposition, drawing accusations from the Socialist Party that Sarkozy was threatening press freedom.

Pigasse and Berge are both supporters of IMF head Dominique Strauss- Kahn, who is a likely rival to Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election.

Under the Berge-Pigasse-Niel bid, the investors will be required to stump up an initial 10 million euros, without which the paper may not be able to pay its journalists' salaries in the coming months.

AFP