Amanda Meade
Friday 15 September 2017 05.32 BSTLast modified on Friday 15 September 2017 06.26 BST
Billionaires Lachlan Murdoch and Bruce Gordon have submitted a late bid for the Ten network, just hours after
the cross media laws were passed by parliament on Thursday night opening the way for them to own a TV network.
Receivers KordaMentha will consider the offer from Murdoch and Gordon’s investment vehicles Illyria and Birketu over the weekend, a spokesman told Guardian Australia on Friday.
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KordaMentha will examine the legality of such a late bid because it has missed the formal deadline of 25 August, he said.
The audacious bid comes at the end of a week
which saw the Murdoch and Gordon camp take to court to delay a scheduled creditors’ meeting on Monday.
The Tuesday meeting would have seen creditors, including Ten staff and program suppliers, asked to accept the offer for Australia’s third-rated commercial television network from
CBS.
The spokesman said KordaMentha would wait for the New South Wales supreme court’s decision on Monday before making a public announcement.
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The 11th hour move by the Murdoch camp puts the future the successful CBS bid in doubt,
despite an agreement by the $28bn US media and entertainment giant CBS to buy the network last month.
The CBS offer was accepted by the administrators, KordaMentha, over the offer by Birketu/Illyria.
The new bid is reportedly higher than the CBS bid, according to the
Australian Financial Review.
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Receivers PPB Advisory were appointed by the Commonwealth Bank in June over a $200m debt falling due in December, and no longer guaranteed by shareholders Murdoch and Gordon.
It is understood employees of Ten do not favour a Birketu/Illyria bid over a CBS one, especially since a takeover by the Australian billionaires would likely mean massive job losses at Ten.
In KordaMentha’s
second report, released to creditors last week, it recommended an offer from US broadcaster CBS, which is the largest creditor, over one from Birketu/Illyria.
In the report, the Birketu/Illyria or B&I reveal they plan to get out of the leases for the Channel Ten studios in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, meaning the home of Ten’s television and news studios would be shut down. The Pyrmont studios in inner city Sydney is the home of Ten news, and The Project is produced out of the Melbourne studios of Ten.
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There is widespread speculation that the new owners would use the resources of Sky News to produce Channel Ten’s news if the bid was successful. Sources said Sky is keen to get a hold of a free-to-air network.
“B&I Transaction document made provision for the repudiation of the leases relating to Pyrmont, Melbourne and Adelaide,” the KordaMentha report said. “Operationally seen as moderate to high risk.”
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said the report revealed that Murdoch and Gordon plan to close Ten studios in Adelaide and Melbourne, “a move which would ultimately result in less diversity in the media in a city like Adelaide that needs more”.
“CBS have already committed to no job losses if their bid to takeover Channel 10 is accepted, and this bid must be allowed to go ahead,” Hanson-Young said. “If the government was serious about media diversity, it would back journalism jobs, not newsroom closures.”
