Germany's Berliner Zeitung newspaper has launched an attack on an investment fund takeover plan headed by Northern Irish businessman and former Mirror group executive David Montgomery.
Berliner Zeitung editor-in-chief Uwe Vorkötter said Mr Montgomery, with the 3i investment consortium, had "at best a rudimentary knowledge of the German newspaper market", and "illusions" about aggressive expansion into the market.
"Our business is the future of the Berliner Zeitung. I urgently dissuade trusting this to David Montgomery," Dr Vorkötter said in a letter to readers yesterday.
The Berliner Zeitung was first published in the Soviet sector, later East Berlin, in May 1945. It survived German unification to become the city's best-selling broadsheet, with daily sales of 180,000 - some 45,000 ahead of its closest rival, the Tagesspiegel.
When the Holtzbrinck group, publisher of the Tagesspiegel, bought the Berliner Zeitung three years ago, the deal came to the attention of the cartel office. It ruled that owning both leading quality Berlin broadsheets would give Holtzbrinck a dominant position in the market. Holtzbrinck now wants to make a quick sale.
The most prominent bidder is Mr Montgomery through his company Mecom, along with the 3i group and the merchant bank, Veronis Suhler Stevenson.
With Mr Montgomery, the 3i group bought two Northern Ireland newspaper groups for £46 million in 2003, becoming publisher of, among other titles, the News Letter and the Derry Journal. After 20 months, it sold off these holdings for £65 million.
