Cash-strapped Standard loses another £20m

It’s little wonder Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev ended 165 years of history when he closed the paper’s daily evening edition last year – new figures filed with Companies House showed just how much the struggling title was losing.

The Standard has reported a pre-tax loss of a whopping £19.6m in the year up to last September – the month it moved to a weekly-only edition under a rebranded title. The previous year the paper lost £20.6m, taking the total sum lost over the past eight years to almost £125m.

Lebedev has pledged to provide funds to keep the newspaper company going after the filed accounts said it “will require additional funding in order to continue as a going concern” between now and next April. But worryingly for its remaining hacks the “significant additional” funding needed to keep the lights on at its Liverpool Street headquarters have yet to be agreed with its shareholders.

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The accounts say that Lebedev had written a “letter of support” that “expresses willingness to provide continued support to the company to allow it to meet its day-to-day working capital requirements” during the company’s 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,” it said.

At least Lebedev – full name Baron Lebedev of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation – won’t be distracted from the task in hand by his duties on the red benches.

Lebedev, appointed to the House of Lords in 2020 by his pal Boris Johnson, has managed to speak a grand total of three times in his more than four-and-a-half years as a peer, putting him in the 1% of the House’s least active members. He has tabled six written questions in that time, most recently in December last year when he queried what assessment the government had made of using ketamine to treat mental health.