Mr Lebedev bought the loss-making Evening Standard for the symbolic sum of one pound last year and immediately relaunched it as a free newspaper, sharply increasing its readership as a result.

He bought the Independent and the Independent on Sunday last month, also for one pound, though its previous owners, Independent News & Media, agreed to pay Mr Lebedev’s company 9.25 million pounds over the next 10 months to assume "all future trading liabilities and obligations."

"I do not treat newspapers as business. I treat them as my responsibility," Mr Lebedev said in a recent interview with Agence France-Presse. "I think newspapers are the only instrument which, through investigative reporting, can ferret out everything about international corruption."

Mr Lebedev will speak at a lunch gathering on Thursday, 10 June, at the World Editors Forum conference in Beirut, which features a series of special meetings in addition to its regular business sessions. Other featured speakers in these "social events", for a limited number of registered WEF participants, include Saad Hariri, President of the Lebanese Council of Ministers, and Hassan Fadlallah, Chairman of the Lebanese Parliament Media Committee and a prominent member of Hezbollah.

Full details can be found at www.wanlebanon2010.com/articles.php....

Around 1,500 chief editors, publishers, CEOs, managing directors and other senior newspaper executives are expected to attend the Editors Forum, the World Newspaper Congress and Info Services Expo, the global summit meetings of the world’s press organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and hosted by the An-Nahar newspaper.

WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation for the news publishing industry.

Learn more about WAN-IFRA at www.wan-ifra.org or through the WAN-IFRA Magazine.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, WAN-IFRA, 7 rue Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: larry.kilman@wan-ifra.org.