FORMER KGB agent and Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev is in advanced talks to buy the London Evening Standard newspaper, it was reported yesterday.

Lebedev is poised to agree a deal to buy 76percent of the Standard, the only remaining paid-for evening paper in the British capital, leaving current owner Associated Newspapers with 24percent, according to the British Guardian.

Lebedev said he had read the Evening Standard and other British newspapers when he was a young spy at the Soviet embassy in London in the late 1980s. "I had to read every newspaper. I was there for that. I had to read the FT, the Guardian, Standard and the Daily Mail." - AFP