Up to 2,000 jobs have been saved after a Swedish investment company agreed to step in at Britain’s biggest independent printer.
Proventus Capital Partners will acquire a majority stake in Polestar in return for pumping emergency funds into the business.
Polestar prints, among other magazines, Hello!, Cosmopolitan, Grazia and the Radio Times, and was on the brink of collapse after a slide in newspaper and magazine sales.
It hired Deloitte, the accountancy company, to advise it on a restructuring and told some suppliers they would not be paid until January.
Polestar prints 43m magazines every week and employs almost 2,000 people across seven sites.
Proventus was already Polestar’s biggest lender after providing £90m of debt only nine months ago. However, a secret report by Deloitte revealed that the printer was running out of cash and needed £18m to survive.
Proventus and Polestar have not revealed the terms of the deal. Proventus told PrintWeek, the trade magazine, that it had provided an undisclosed amount of funding “to stabilise the business and secure the longer-term prospects of the Polestar group”.
However, suppliers to Polestar and other creditors could still scupper the deal if they do not agree to the terms.
Barry Hibbert, Polestar’s chief executive, did not return calls seeking comment. He warned earlier this month that jobs could be lost as part of a deal to save the company. “The business has been downsizing for 10 years and I don’t see that changing,” he said.
Polestar has a chequered history. It used to be owned by Robert Maxwell, the controversial media tycoon, and has run into trouble twice before.
Four years ago the Pension Protection Fund was forced to wind down and take on the company’s pension scheme, which had more than 8,000 members and a £529m deficit.
The company was owned by Sun Capital Partners, a private equity firm, which now faces seeing its investment wiped out.
Polestar was formed in 1998 when the British Printing Company, which used to be owned by Maxwell, was merged with Watmoughs, a once publicly listed printing business.
However, since then it has been under pressure from declining newspaper and magazine sales. In the last decade it has shrunk from 28 sites to seven and its workforce has fallen from more than 5,000 to 2,000. At the same time it has struggled under the weight of about £100m in debt.
Its problems have been compounded in the last two months by the departure of its chief financial officer, Peter Johnston, and its chief operating officer, Peter Andreou.
