Saudi Investors Have Winning Bid for UPI : Media: The bankruptcy judge accepts the $3.95-million cash offer from Middle East Broadcasting Centre of London.

United Press International landed its fifth owner in a decade when a bankruptcy judge Tuesday approved a $3.95-million cash offer for the wire service from a London-based broadcaster owned by Saudi Arabian interests.

The winning bid by Middle East Broadcasting Centre Ltd. topped a $3.75-million offer from New York lawyer Leon Charney, whose $180,000 emergency cash infusion 10 days ago saved the 85-year-old news agency from ceasing operations.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Francis Conrad rejected a $900,000 bid from religious broadcaster Pat Robertson for UPI’s name, archives and copyrights.

Robertson’s most recent offer, unlike the $6-million bid for the company that he made and later withdrew, would have forced the news service to shut down and to lay off its 500 workers.

UPI employees have been in “Dante’s hell because they never know if they’re going to have a job from one Friday to the next,” Conrad said during the daylong hearing.

“Lord only knows, in this economy, we need to keep as many reporters alive and eating as we can,” the judge added later.

Middle East Broadcasting Centre, according to its attorneys, broadcasts nine hours of Arabic-language television programming a day from its London studios to viewers throughout the Middle East and Europe.

Michael Costelloe, an attorney for the company, declined to specifically identify the company’s principals. “It’s a Saudi Arabian investment group,” he said.

Another attorney for the company, Sandra Riemer, said Middle East Broadcasting Centre’s financial resources are “so large that I don’t even know them myself.”

UPI--which was the first wire service to report that shots had been fired at President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and boasts such illustrious alumni as Walter Cronkite--has lost money for 30 years. Twice during the past decade, it has sought protection from its creditors in bankruptcy court.

UPI’s woes occurred as the Associated Press consolidated its lead in the basic wire service business, and supplemental wire services, such as the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, rose to prominence.

UPI has been under foreign ownership before, when Mexican businessman Mario Vazquez Reyna attempted to turn it around between 1986 and 1988.

The purchase by Middle East Broadcasting is scheduled to close Saturday or earlier, and Riemer said the company is prepared to pump $10 million to $12 million into UPI over the next two years to keep it going.

“We don’t think it’s over yet. We’re going to appeal,” said Charney, the unsuccessful bidder who said he believed that his $180,000 cash infusion had given him exclusive rights to buy UPI.

“UPI is an American press service, and we believe it should be held by Americans,” he added.

Steve Geimann, executive vice president of UPI, said he did not know much about the new owners and is “reserving judgment” until he learns more about them and their intentions.

“I look forward to talking to them, sitting down, finding out their ideas,” he said, adding that he is relieved that the uncertainty about UPI’s survival had been resolved.

Costelloe, the Middle East Broadcasting attorney, dismissed Charney’s fears that UPI’s new Saudi owners would censor the news, as the Saudi government does. “The asset they are buying is the franchise and the network of veteran reporters,” he said.