The Daily Telegraph’s publisher is to hand hundreds of staff a £500 bonus this month as uncertainty over its ownership looks set to stretch into a third calendar year.
Sky News has seen an email sent on Thursday by Anna Jones, Telegraph Media Group’s chief executive, in which she told employees that they would receive the payout in their December pay packages.
She told them that the company had recorded one billion non-subscriber page views on its website for the first time, although she acknowledged that the newspaper group had made “slower progress than we would have liked… in terms of net new digital subscribers”.
Her email was sent as an exclusivity period for Dovid Efune, the New York Sun publisher, about buying the Telegraph titles nears an end.
The period has been extended once already as Mr Efune seeks to line up financing for the deal.
Last month, Sky News revealed that Apollo Global Management was among the parties examining providing debt to his bid.
However, it emerged in the Financial Times this week that Todd Boehly, the Chelsea Football Club co-owner, was exploring a counterbid for the Telegraph.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor, is also involved in the talks as an adviser to Liontree, which is aiding Mr Efune’s bid.
Insiders said that Mr Zahawi was likely to be handed an ongoing role at the Telegraph if Mr Efune was successful.
The former chancellor, education secretary and vaccines minister has been involved in the Telegraph process in various guises, initially helping broker a deal with RedBird IMI before assembling his own offer.
Other bidders for the Telegraph earlier in the process included National World, the London-listed vehicle headed by former Mirror newspapers chief David Montgomery, and Lord Saatchi, the former advertising mogul, who offered £350m.
The Telegraph auction is being run by Raine Group and Robey Warshaw, the advisers to the Abu Dhabi-backed entity which was thwarted in its efforts to buy the media titles by a change in ownership law.