In an ongoing row between CLT-UFA, TM3 minority shareholder Herbert Kloiber and News Corp about German television rights of the Champions League, the latter has moved ahead with his plans to sell the rights to general interest channel RTL and pay-TV broadcaster Premiere World.

According to industry sources, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns 66 per cent of TM3, the Munich-based channel which currently screens the football games, has made fellow shareholder Kloiber (34 per cent) an offer for his shares. Murdoch could then honour an agreement he worked out before Christmas with CLT-UFA, majority owner of Germany’s RTL, which showed the Champions League until Murdoch and Kloiber acquired the rights last year to increase TM3’s audience share.

This agreement includes the sale of Murdoch’s 49.9 per cent stake in Cologne-based general interest channel VOX to minority shareholder CLT-UFA, effectively turning the channel into a member of the RTL channel family. Murdoch also promised to hand the Champions league rights back to RTL with the pay-TV rights being forwarded to Premiere World, in which Murdoch recently took a 24 per cent stake. However, those plans were torpedoed by Kloiber, who insists on his right to veto any resale of the Champions League rights. In several interviews, Kloiber stressed that he was not willing to give away the rights from TM3 under any condition. Murdoch’s move to make Kloiber a (probably financially lucrative) offer for his TM3 stake is seen as a way of getting control about the Champions League rights to resell to RTL and Premiere World. Observers believe that Murdoch will not hold the TM3 shares for long as it is clear that he has lost interest in the highly competitive German free-to-air television market. Instead, he is expected to sell TM3 to his Premiere World partner Kirch Group. Kirch Group is apparently considering closing the channel and handing over its valuable analogue cable coverage to N24, the news channel it launched on Monday which is so far only available to 30 per cent of the German TV households.