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Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Standard, has pledged to provide funds to keep the newspaper company going after it lost nearly £20m in the year before it went weekly.
The paper, formerly the Evening Standard, which had been published daily in London for almost 200 years, was rebranded last autumn to make it a digital-first publication, supported by a weekly print edition, the London Standard.
The Standard reported a pre-tax loss of £19.6m in the year to 29 September, according to its latest accounts, which cover the period just before the rebrand.
A year earlier the paper lost £20.6m loss a year , taking the total sum lost over the past eight years to almost £125m.
After years of failing to turn a profit, the company “will require additional funding in order to continue as a going concern” between now and April next year, according to the accounts.
The latest losses have been covered by the Standard’s owners, led by Lord Lebedev, its largest shareholder. However, the publisher said the “significant additional” funding needed to keep operating, according to its cashflow forecasts, had not yet been agreed with its shareholders.
It added that Lebedev had written a “letter of support” that bosses said “expresses willingness to provide continued support to the company to allow it meet its day-to-day working capital requirements” during its restructuring.
“Whilst there is no formal funding facility in place, the directors are confident of the intention of Lord Evgeny Lebedev to provide this support,” the publisher said.
The company received loans worth almost £23m from its shareholders during the year to the end of September, compared with loans of £21.2m a year earlier. It has also received a further loan of £6m since late September.
The Standard signed an agreement with its shareholders in late 2024 that no interest would be payable on new loans made on or after 31 March 2023, while interest would longer be accrued on loans from 2020 and 2022 from 1 April 2023.
Since the period covered by the latest accounts the company has been carrying out a restructuring plan as it seeks to cut costs amid its move to a weekly print publication.
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The Standard struggled after the pandemic as its business model of printing hundreds of thousands of free newspapers for commuters had collapsed. Many office workers have since spent at least part of the week working from home, at the same time as the 5G phone signal has been rolled out across several London Underground tube lines and stations.
Lebedev, who was was given a seat in the House of Lords by the former prime minister Boris Johnson, also owns the digital-only Independent newspaper.
Lebedev pulled the plug on London Live, the capital’s dedicated TV channel he owned, in January after a decade of mounting losses.
