Lebedev is buying the Evening Standard

The Russian billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is still set to buy the London Evening Standard, even though a delay has meant contracts could not be signed today. As reported here last week, the tycoon, who is a friend and business partner of the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had been in talks with the company that owns the loss-making Standard, the Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT), but it had been thought the sale had been vetoed by its chairman, Lord Rothermere. Not so.

Under the terms of the deal, Lebedev, who last year was listed 39th among Russia's top 100 billionaires by Forbes magazine, will purchase 76 per cent of the newspaper, with the Associated Newspapers group retaining the rest. His son Evgeny, who lives in London, is due to sign the deal with DMG, and with that, say sources inside the paper, will come a regime change.

It is almost certain the Standard's existing editor, Veronica Wadley, will go, having presided over the largest circulation drop in the paper's history. Geordie Greig, the 48-year-old Old Etonian editor of Tatler magazine (pictured), who is close to both Lebedev senior and junior, is mooted as the new editor or editor-in-chief. Although he has edited the society magazine for a decade, he has previous Fleet Street experience as a war reporter, crime reporter and literary editor.

The purchase is an astonishing moment in press history, because it means a former foreign agent will soon own a British newspaper. Speaking to the Guardian, Lebedev said he had read the Evening Standard and other British newspapers when he was a young spy at the Soviet embassy in London in the late 1980s.

"I had to read every newspaper. I was there for that," he recalled. "I had to read the FT, the Guardian, Standard and the Daily Mail."

Lebedev, 59, is known as a semi-opposition figure in Russia who has frequently been at odds with Vladimir Putin, the country's former president and current prime minister.

He is also part owner of the critical Novaya Gazeta paper, one of the last sources of media opposition inside Russia to the government, though he told the Guardian he had no intention of using the Standard to exert influence and that he felt it might not even make him any money, either.

"As far as I'm concerned this [buying the Standard] has nothing to do with making money. There are lots of other ways. This is a good way to waste money," he said.

And the Standard may not be the Russian’s only newspaper purchase. There are rumours that he has his eye on the struggling Independent – rumours that the paper's editor, Roger Alton, did nothing to quash in an exchange with Kelvin McKenzie, the former Sun editor, when both men appeared on Sky TV late on Wednesday night.

Alton said of Lebedev: "Maybe he will buy the Independent". This may have baffled viewers, but staff at the Indy were left wondering whether it was another case of "many a true word spoken in jest".