The first Adult Business to be listed on stock market
The adult magazines publishing group founded by Express owner Richard Desmond seeks a listing on the junior Plus Market, and if this will be provided it will be the first listing on the stock market for business working in the adult sphere. Interactive Publishing, a shell group, is floating after a reverse takeover deal with Trojan Publishing, a private business that has a large portfolio of top-shelf titles such as Asian Babes, Forty Plus and New Talent.
After Trojan Publishing Group bought rights to about 30 former Desmond titles last year, in June 2006 it acquired about a dozen mostly adult magazines from British Virgin Islands-registered AML Publishing Trust. Also, in 2006 Trojan signed a deal with Penthouse, licensing rights to Forum - another adult magazine.
A stock market listing for Desmond’s onetime porn titles comes two months after a bankruptcy order was made against Simon Robinson – a former Express journalist who had acquired the titles, trading as Remnant Media, from Desmond in 2004 for £10.8m. Remnant slipped into administration last year only to be snapped up by Trojan, a business at which Robinson had been a director until January 2007.