British Sky Broadcasting Group is in talks to buy Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland, the Italian and German pay-TV assets of 21st Century Fox,
Bloomberg reported.
Fox owns 39% of BSkyB. The deal could be worth $14 billion, the article said.
Fox owns all of Sky Italia and 5% of Sky Deutschland, the Bloomberg article said. Consolidation of the assets could “potentially set [Murdoch] up to increase Fox’s stake” in BSkyB, the article said.
Rupert Murdoch and his son James have tried twice to win control of the company, the Bloomberg report noted. They scuttled their last attempt, in 2011, amid fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at their U.K. newspapers. James Murdoch ran News Corp.’s European operations at the time.
James Murdoch serves on BSkyB’s board. He spent nine years as either chairman or CEO of BSkyB and is now co-chief operating officer of Fox. He was named chairman of Sky Deutschland in September, the Bloomberg report said.
The companies have been in talks for months. James Murdoch said on a conference call, “We’ve made no secret of our belief over the years that we think the Skys are strong together,” the Bloomberg article said.
“A combination of the Sky companies would leave Fox as a pure-play content business with TV networks and a movie studio, making it more attractive to investors who want to bet solely on entertainment programming and not distribution,” the Bloomberg report noted. (Source: Bloomberg, May 12, 2014.)
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