Le Monde board to rule on bidder

PARIS (AP) - The supervisory board for France's Le Monde is meeting Monday to choose a new owner for the iconic but debt-saddled newspaper - an owner who will take financial control out of the journalists' hands for the first time since 1951.

A leading bidder, a group that includes the owner of Spain's El Pais and France's former state telecoms monopoly, said hours before the meeting that it would pull out.

The journalists' committee that oversees strategic choices at Le Monde overwhelmingly backs the rival bid by a business trio formed by Internet billionaire Xavier Niel, Lazard banker Matthieu Pigasse and Pierre Berge, an arts patron and longtime partner of the late designer Yves Saint-Laurent.

The Le Monde says it needs help to pay off debts and survive punishing times in the media industry and is looking for an estimated euro100 million ($124 million) capital increase. Le Monde is on the edge of bankruptcy and needs the cash fast.

France's telecoms giant, Orange, which made a joint bid with the French Nouvel Observateur magazine and the Spanish group Prisa, owner of El Pais, issued a statement Monday to announce the group would not maintain its offer after the journalists' committee favored the other bid by 90 percent.

The journalists' committee met last week, paving the way for Monday's meeting of the newspaper's supervisory board.

The board meeting Monday is to choose to enter exclusive talks with a bidder, conditional on a deposit of euro10 million. It is widely expected to select the business trio, known by the acronyms of the three men's last names: BNP.

French media reported that conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy tried to weigh in on Le Monde's takeover, favoring the bid led by Orange, in which the French state maintains a majority stake. Critics accused him of meddling with the media to find a more docile owner for Le Monde, which has a strong history of independence, before 2012 presidential elections.

Founded in 1944 after much of the French press had been discredited for collaborating with the Nazis who occupied France during World War II, the center-left Le Monde has been controlled by its journalists for decades. But a series of hazardous business ventures and long-declining readership figures have left the daily struggling for cash.

While previous capital increases allowed the journalists to retain control, Monday's decision is expected to lead to the newspaper's de-facto takeover.

The bid's exact financial and legal conditions will be known after the supervisory board meeting, said le Monde spokeswoman Anne Hartenstein. She had no further details.