Who Owns Daily Mail?

The Daily Mail is owned by the Rothermere family, who took the business private in 2021 after nearly ninety years on the stock market. Companies House names five people with significant control of Daily Mail and General Trust, each recorded with 75% or more of the voting rights — and only one of them is a Rothermere. The other four are trustees. The register spells out how a family trust actually controls a newspaper. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Daily Mail?

The parent is DAILY MAIL AND GENERAL TRUST P L C (00184594), incorporated 27 September 1922 and registered at Northcliffe House, Kensington. The newspapers are published by Associated Newspapers within the group.

Its five active people with significant control are:

• The Rt Hon. Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere, 4th Viscount Rothermere — British, recorded with ownership of voting rights, 75% or more, with control over the trustees of a trust
• Mrs Aine Deirdre O’Reilly — Irish
• Mr Nigel Timothy Bentley — British
• Thomas Stuart Gillespie — Canadian
• Francois Leo Morin — Canadian

The last four are each recorded at 75% or more of the voting rights too. That does not mean five people each control three-quarters of the company. Where shares are held by trustees, PSC rules require every trustee to be registered as though holding the whole — the same convention that puts nine names on the Weston family’s register and two on Fiji Water’s elsewhere on this site.

Parent company and ownership structure

Viscount Rothermere’s entry is the one that carries the meaning. The phrase with control over the trustees of a trust is a distinct category in the PSC rules: it records a person who can direct the trustees rather than one who holds the shares.

So the structure is a family trust holding the voting shares, four professional trustees administering it, and one person able to control those trustees. That is the whole answer to who owns the Daily Mail, and unusually the register states it plainly rather than stopping at a holding company.

The offshore vehicle used for the take-private, Rothermere Continuation Limited, is registered in Bermuda and files nothing here.

Major shareholders or controlling interests

There are no outside shareholders. DMGT is private, so there is no market price, no free float and no obligation to disclose holdings to anyone.

DMGT’s shares were always structured to protect family control even while listed: the publicly traded A shares carried no votes, and the voting shares stayed with the family. Public investors owned the economics and never the control — the same arrangement seen at Spotify and Porsche elsewhere on this site.

Other media assets in the group

The group publishes the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, Metro, the i paper and MailOnline, and owns the New Scientist. It agreed terms to buy the Telegraph titles in November 2025, but that deal did not complete: RedBird IMI’s interest was sold instead to the German publisher Axel Springer in March 2026. DMGT does not own the Telegraph.

DMGT was for decades a diversified group with insurance risk modelling, events and property information businesses, most of which have been sold. The take-private was conditional on some of those disposals, including the £1.4bn sale of the RMS risk business to Moody’s.

Ownership history

The Daily Mail was founded in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, with his brother Harold, later the 1st Viscount Rothermere. The company was formed in 1922 and floated, and the family has controlled it through four generations since.

The decisive recent event is dated on the register. Six PSC entries ceased on 24 February 2022 — the same five names plus the Viscountess — as the take-private completed and DMGT left the London Stock Exchange after nearly ninety years. Lord Rothermere had held around 36% before bidding and reached roughly 85% through the offer.

Two register details from that moment are worth noting. The same individuals appear as both ceased in February 2022 and active from their original 2016 dates — the entries were cancelled and re-filed as the structure was rebuilt. And on 24 February 2022 the company filed a statement that it had not completed reasonable steps to identify a registrable person, withdrawing it on 11 April 2022. For seven weeks, the register said the owner of the Daily Mail was undetermined.

Sources and verification

All five active entries, the six cessations of 24 February 2022, the withdrawn statement and the trust wording are from the Companies House register and can be checked directly. The register now also shows identity verification dates for the named individuals under the new Companies House regime.

Rothermere Continuation Limited is Bermudian and outside Companies House, so the terms of the take-private and the family’s precise economic interests are established by the offer documents and press reporting rather than by any UK filing. Companies House does not verify most filed information.