Freshly greened Blackwell denies it is up for sale

Blackwell Publishing CEO René Olivieri has denied press reports that the publishing company has been put on the market by its owners, the Blackwell family.

A Financial Times story in March claimed that if the Blackwell family sold Blackwell Publishing it would raise £600m for the ailing bookshop business.

“These articles show up from time to time,” said Olivieri, who claimed the FT had misrepresented the Blackwell empire as one corporate entity.

“They are two separate companies; it is not a publishing arm and a bookshop,” he said, adding that there was merely a major shareholder overlap, with members of the Blackwell family being dominant shareholders in both companies.

Brushing aside growing speculation of an acquisition by venture capitalists, and that financial advisers JP Morgan Cazenove had been appointed, Olivieri said that the 2005 figures would show the best year yet.

In 2002, rival academic publisher Taylor & Francis bid £300m for Blackwell Publishing. The bid failed due to disagreement between family members.

Meanwhile, a corporate strategy to be carbon-neutral and mitigate the amount of environmental damage done by publishing has also been announced by Blackwell ( click here for more Blackwell news).

Carbon-neutral companies must change the way they use energy, ship their products and conduct business travel.

Mike Fenton, operations director for Blackwell, told IWR that the company had achieved carbon neutrality after an assessment by environmental experts at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management . “This is an auditing process where our bills, office space and number of air miles travelled are measured using an algorithm,” said Fenton.

Suppliers have also been reviewed and off-sets put in place where carbon pollution is unavoidable. Fenton said these took the form of sustainable forestry projects in India, Sri Lanka,Mexico and Scotland.

Fenton said there was an element of marketing to the strategy. “We work with people [the societies] who do good for the world – they want to do the right thing. This policy won’t do us any harm.”

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