Family members meet to decide if Blackwell is to be put up for sale

The future of one of Britain's most prestigious publishing businesses will be the subject of a Blackwell family meeting, convened today to determine whether or not to sell Blackwell Publishers.

A family dispute erupted after Julian "Toby" Blackwell, the former chairman, began pressing for a sale of the Oxford academic publishing business. A disposal would end 76 years of family ownership and could fetch up to £400m, making it a tidy catch for a trade buyer.

However, Nigel Blackwell, Toby's nephew and the current chairman, has opposed the sale. He would prefer to float the business in a couple of years, once the benefits of the merger last July between Blackwell Publishers and Blackwell Science have come through. With the exception of Nigel Blackwell, the company's executive directors will meet with Toby Blackwell today, before a full board meeting next week.

Analysts say possible buyers of what is one of the world's largest private media companies are likely to include Taylor & Francis, the scientific publisher, Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch publishers, the German publishing houses Bertelsmanns Springer and Wolters Kluwer, and John Wiley of the US. The company has not received any approaches yet.

The proposal to sell Blackwell Publishers, which is run separately from the bookselling business Blackwell Ltd, was prompted by the death last year of Miles Blackwell, the family heir and chairman of the retail arm.

Many family members are believed to have been upset at the fall in value of their shares, as determined by an internal market, following the merger of the publishing businesses. The formula price for shares in Blackwell Science fell from £15.33 to £8.31. This compares with a potential value of between £25 to £70 per share if the business was sold.

Up to now, a complex share capital structure of voting A shares and non-voting B shares, which hold the economic value, has preserved the Blackwell family's involvement in the business. However, some shareholders are understood to have questioned the current management's capabilities.

Toby Blackwell, 73, is believed to control more than half of the A shares, largely held by a few family members, while Nigel Blackwell believes the board controls just less than half the votes. A 75 per cent majority of the votes would be required to allow a sale, while a simple majority would be enough to vote out the board.

Analysts said if the decision were made to put Blackwell's up for sale, the business would join a number of publishers on the market. The slump in advertising has hit the industry hard, although as a publisher of scientific, medical and ecological papers and journals, Blackwell's has fared better than most. The company, which had sales of around £150m last year, has admitted its most recent figures were not good, but has not released them yet.