A French Internet billionaire, a patron of the arts and a flamboyant banker won control of the Le Monde newspaper on 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.
Mr. Berge, Mr. Pigasse and Mr. Niel promised to let the paper's editors maintain full editorial independence and let the journalists' association keep its right to veto major decisions.
The world's leading French-language newspaper has been struggling to survive in the Internet age and called for investors willing to buy into the loss-making daily and pay off its debt of around €100 million.
Several bidders — including a Russian billionaire — joined the race to take over what for the moment is more of a status symbol than a viable money-making business.
A senior journalist at the newspaper, who asked not be named, said Le Monde staff were on the whole happy with the outcome and believed that the trio would honour 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-centre daily's search for fresh capital turned political earlier this month when Mr. 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 Mr. Sarkozy was threatening press freedom.
About 280 journalists work for Le Monde , which has a circulation of about 3,00,000.
