Greek Antenna, better known as ANT1 TV, will become the new owner of Belgrade Fox television starting January, a Belgrade tabloid is reporting.
ANT1 TV owner Minos Kyriakou bought Fox for one dollar and took on all potential debts of the company, Blic writes.
The daily also states that the long negotiations ended several days ago for the sale of Fox, and that the deal will be announced in January.
According to unofficial information, the station ownership changed hands as Fox boss Rupert Murdoch decided to sell all of his Southeast Europe outlets.
With this move, Murdoch wants to pull all so-called land frequencies in the region and invest solely in cable-satellite systems such as Sky, which has 18 million subscribers in the UK, five million in Italy, and about eight million in Germany and Austria.
Murdoch and Kyriakou are good friends and were able to reach an agreement quickly on the sale of Serbia’s Fox, say newspaper reports today.
Blic writes that Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou was involved in the negotiations and that Kyriakou also met with Serbian President Boris Tadić, who gave guarantees that Fox would not have problems in receiving a license from the State Broadcasting Agency.
The agency is expected to hold a meeting today to discuss the issue, and ANT1 TV has already submitted an official demand for taking over Fox already, Blic writes.
Tadić’s cabinet, however, today stated that the president did meet with Kyriakou, but that there was no agreement for changing the ownership structure of Fox in the meeting.
“The president does not deal with changes in the ownership structure of the media, nor was this the topic of the talks with Mr. Kyriakou. The two talked about energy issues,” Jasmina Stojanov, who is responsible for media relations within the president’s cabinet, told tabloid Alo.
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