This year may look leaner for media investment, but a Greek shipping magnate may offer salvation for any publishers out there still looking to get bought. Theodore Kyriakou is looking to add some British acquisitions to his media portfolio, writes FT.com.

Kyriakou is set to amass a rare €2.42 billion (£1.89 million) war chest for media M&A this year, adding to what was already a €1.25 billion (£98 million) fund by selling the Bulgarian wing of his Antenna TV company to Swedish newspaper group Modern Times for €628 million (£600 million). In June, Kyriakou appointed Guillaume de Posch from German pay-TV outfit ProSiebenSat to look after M&A, saying “the UK will be hit pretty hard next year and there could be some good opportunities”; the new man started work last week.

Kyriakou will keep the deals as cash offers for the next six months before considering going to the banks for some leverage, a strategy designed to avoid the sort of credit deadlock reached during Reed Elsevier’s ill-fated divestment of its RBI B2B division. Kyriakou has previously been linked to a bid for ITV (LSE: ITV) and, though that sounds highly unlikely, he is ruling nothing out. Looking at the market cap for some of the UK’s highest profile media companies, some could be bought up for fractions of the value one or two years ago. Johnston Press, for example, is valued today at just £83.1 million. But, perhaps quite sensibly, Kyriakou is interested in a range of media companies but “probably not newspapers”.