Publishing company Pearson is selling its 50% stake in the Economist Group for £469 million (~$730 million), reports the BBC. Exor, the holding group of the Agnelli family, will buy 27.8% of the ordinary shares for £227.5 million and all of the B special shares for £59.5 million. The rest of Pearson’s remaining ordinary shares will be repurchased by the Economist Group for a total of £182 million. Note that the transaction is still subject to regulatory approval and an approval of 75% majority by both, the Economist Group shareholders and the group’s independent trustees. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2015. Pearson mentions that it will use the money gained for general corporate purposes and to invest in its education division. Interestingly, just last month, Pearson sold the Financial Times Group to the Japanese media firm Nikkei for £844 million in cash. The company, which owned FT and Economist for over 50 years, had said that it remained committed to the newspapers because of its strong brand, although it looks like it now wants to focus only on its offerings in the education sector. Bangalore Court case: The Bangalore City Court recently restrained Pearson’s Indian arm from using or referring to any outputs from Kaleido, a patent pending student assessment and analytics platform by Bangalore based education startup. New Rubric had approached the court in June alleging that Pearson had plagiarised the analysis generated by Kaleido, with evidence from a YouTube video, where a…
