Salt Lake City – A federal judge upheld an appraisal for The Salt Lake Tribune that former owners claimed was inflated, making it too expensive for them to buy it back.
U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell ruled this week that a final appraisal that helped set the price for Utah’s largest paper at $355.5 million cannot be set aside because there were no allegations of fraud, corruption or other wrongdoing in establishing the paper’s value.
The Tribune’s longtime former owners, the McCarthey family, contend they had a contractual option to buy back the paper five years after selling it in a 1997 stock swap to cable-TV giant Tele-Communications Inc.
Family members say that when AT&T acquired TCI in 1999, it promised to honor the option but instead sold the paper to Denver-based ap Inc. for $200 million.
Lawyers for MediaNews argued that the McCartheys agreed to a process that left no room for quarrel or second-guessing by the courts. Both sides enlisted Management Planning Inc. of Princeton, N.J., to narrow earlier, disparate appraisals.
MPI valued the paper at $331 million, and the agreement set the final price midway between MPI’s and the closer of the two earlier appraisals, for a final price of $355.5 million.
MediaNews owns 40 other daily newspapers, including The Denver Post.
