IBC to offload stake

INTERNATIONAL Business Communications, the conference organiser and newsletter group, is poised to sell a stake in its Fleet Street Publications stable of financial newsletters, which includes the Penny Share Guide tipsheet.

Tony Cropper, finance director, admitted he was in talks with Agora, a US newsletter publisher based in Baltimore. He said the aim was to sell about 50 per cent of Fleet Street.

'We are in discussions to do a 50/50 type thing with them,' he said. 'We have not reached a conclusion, but hopefully something should happen in the next month or so.'

IBC wants Agora to become involved in the financial newsletters because it believes the US company should improve their marketing. Circulation of the Fleet Street titles has fallen sharply since their heyday in the mid-1980s.

IBC shares climbed 10p to 191p on Friday, after the company announced that its profits for the six months to end June were likely to be better than expected. It said that results for the period should show a significant advance over the comparable period last year.

The company has recovered well since the recession, when its fortunes became so bleak that its debt was restructured in the summer of 1993.