They were responding to reports that the company had received a £1.3bn takeover offer from the venture capitalists Candover and Apax Partners. Trinity Mirror is reported to have been in talks about the offer since September, and it was rejected in November.
Since then, the board has appointed Sly Bailey as chief executive, with a brief to turn around the fortunes of its struggling national titles, the Daily Mirror, the People and the Sunday Mirror. It was Bailey's first day on the job yesterday, although she is reported to have been informed of the £1.3bn bid in December.
Hope of a takeover of the company is understood to have kept the company's share price from falling further and it has still managed to outperform the FTSE All-Share index in the last year. The news of the informal £1.3bn offer pushed up Trinity Mirror's share price yesterday, closing up 21p at 390.5p -- a rise of 5.7%.
The company is also facing a lawsuit from Ric Piper, who had been set to join the publisher in October as finance director. Trinity Mirror withdrew its offer of the £300,000-a-year job after Piper's former company technology consultancy WS Atkins issued a profits warning, which Trinity Mirror felt brought Piper into disrepute.
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