The Guardian

The Guardian is a British newspaper founded in 1821 by John Edward Taylor as the Manchester Guardian.¹ Guardian Media Group plc, the operating business that publishes its journalism, is wholly owned by the Scott Trust Limited, which its accounts describe as "charged with securing the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity."²

Ownership by the Scott Trust

The Scott Trust Limited (Companies House number 06706464) was incorporated on September 24, 2008 with its registered office at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London. The Scott Trust Endowment Limited (number 13856227) was incorporated on January 18, 2022.³ According to the accounts for the year ended March 31, 2025, the Scott Trust Limited owns Guardian Media Group plc, the operating business, and the Scott Trust Endowment Limited, which controls a portfolio of public equity, fixed income and private equity investments held to generate returns for the Guardian. The accounts record group revenue of £275.9 million (2024: £257.8 million), digital reader revenue of £107.3 million, an adjusted operating loss of £32.7 million (2024: £33.9 million), adjusted cash outflow of £24.3 million, and an endowment fund of £1,246.3 million at year end (2024: £1,274.9 million), with commitments to future investments of £178.6 million.² The accounts state that the Trust agreed the sale of the Observer to Tortoise Media, completed in April 2025, that the Trust invested in Tortoise and became one of its largest shareholders with a seat on its board, and that the Trust is the principal funder of the Guardian Foundation, funds a restorative justice programme arising from the Legacies of Enslavement review, and oversees the Guardian's readers' editor.²

The corporate governance report for 2023 and 2024 states that the board of the Scott Trust Limited comprises its chair, the editor-in-chief (Katharine Viner), a director drawn from among Guardian journalists (Haroon Siddique), a member of the Scott family (Russell Scott, the senior independent director) and seven independent directors, that the chairs of the two boards attend each other's meetings as observers, and that the nominations committee is chaired by Russell Scott. The endowment company's board comprises its chair, Tracy Corrigan, the chair of the Scott Trust, the chief investment officer, Jonathan Evans, the general counsel and company secretary, Stephen Godsell, and two external independent members.⁴

Ole Jacob Sunde joined the Scott Trust in 2015, became acting chair in March 2021 and was announced as chair on June 17, 2021. The announcement stated that he had been elected to the board of the Norwegian media group Schibsted in 2000 and had chaired it since 2002, that he also chairs the Tinius Trust, and that he is a member of the Board of Visitors of the Columbia University School of Journalism.⁵

The Companies House officer register for the Scott Trust Limited lists, with the dates of appointment and resignation shown, directors who include Alan Rusbridger (October 1, 2008 to May 13, 2016), Liz Forgan (September 24, 2008 to November 30, 2016), Jonathan Scott (October 1, 2008 to September 17, 2015), Andrew Graham (October 1, 2008 to November 6, 2015), Will Hutton (October 1, 2008 to February 9, 2017), Maleiha Malik (October 1, 2008 to August 6, 2014), Carolyn McCall (October 1, 2008 to June 30, 2010), Geraldine Proudler (October 1, 2008 to February 6, 2013), Lawrence Elliott (October 1, 2008 to September 7, 2011), Anthony Salz (March 9, 2009 to March 27, 2020), Andrew Miller (September 6, 2010 to June 30, 2015), Heather Stewart (September 7, 2011 to March 7, 2016), Emily Bell (December 1, 2012 to November 10, 2021), Alex Graham (December 1, 2012 to March 26, 2021), Viner (from June 1, 2015), Russell Scott, Sunde, Vivian Schiller (September 17, 2015 to November 25, 2025), Stuart Proffitt (September 17, 2015 to November 25, 2025), Catherine Howarth (September 17, 2015 to September 16, 2022), David Pemsel (September 17, 2015 to December 2, 2019), Sushil Wadhwani (September 17, 2015 to September 18, 2016), Nils Pratley (May 12, 2016 to June 15, 2022), David Olusoga (from June 11, 2018), Mary Ann Sieghart (March 27, 2020 to November 10, 2021), Matthew Ryder (from March 27, 2020), Annette Thomas (March 27, 2020 to July 1, 2021), Siddique (from June 15, 2022), Margaret Simons (from September 7, 2022), Corrigan (from November 18, 2022), Nabiha Syed (from September 28, 2023), Jonathan Paine (from October 31, 2024), Jane Martinson (from October 1, 2025) and Samuel Gregory (from November 25, 2025). The secretary since October 11, 2017 is Stephen Godsell.³

The Snowden files and GCHQ, 2013

Julian Borger reported in the Guardian on August 20, 2013 that "on Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian's King's Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored," watched by technicians from GCHQ who took notes and photographs and left empty-handed. The article stated that shortly after the first story's publication two senior British officials had come to the Guardian's offices to see Rusbridger and Johnson, that they "made it clear they came on high authority to demand the immediate surrender of all the Snowden files," that after three weeks one of them said "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back," and that the compromise brought Paul Johnson, the deputy editor, the executive director Sheila Fitzsimons and the computer expert David Blishen to the basement to meet two GCHQ officials. The article stated that twelve days after the destruction the Guardian reported on United States funding of GCHQ eavesdropping operations.⁶

Rusbridger told the BBC's World at One the same day that the task was "slightly pointless" because digital copies existed outside Britain, that Whitehall officials had threatened legal action "unless we handed it back or destroyed it," and that "given that there were other copies and we could work out of America, which has better laws to protect journalists, I saw no reason not to destroy this material ourselves rather than hand it back to the government."⁷

On September 5, 2013 ProPublica published, in partnership with the New York Times and the Guardian, an article on the National Security Agency's encryption programme that stated that the documents were "among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica."⁸

The Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee

The Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, renamed the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, administers the DA-Notice (later DSMA-Notice) system under a secretary appointed from the Ministry of Defence; its minutes are posted on the dsma.uk website. The minutes of the meeting of November 7, 2013, held at the Ministry of Defence with Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance as secretary, state that the dominant aspect of the reporting period was the publication by the Guardian, and latterly by the Independent, of information from classified documents "stolen by the NSA fugitive Edward Snowden." They state that "at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the DA Notice System before publishing the first tranche of information," that "as a member of the Newspaper Publishers Association (NPA), The Guardian was obliged to seek (but not necessarily to accept) DA Notice advice under the terms of the DA Notice code," that the New York Times was publishing the same details in parallel, and that "towards the end of July The Guardian had begun to seek and accept DA Notice advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details." The vice-chairman, Simon Bucks, told the committee that "99% of the media remained committed to the DA Notice System," that "much of the material published by the Guardian fell into the former category" of embarrassment as distinct from genuine national security concerns, and that the editor "feared that if he shared details of his story with the secretariat it might potentially attract an injunction."⁹

At the next meeting, on May 8, 2014, the acting chairman welcomed Paul Johnson, deputy editor of Guardian News and Media, "as the Newspaper Publishers Association replacement for Jane Crust." The minutes of November 2011 record that Crust, deputy managing editor of the Financial Times, had taken over from Hugh Carnegy as one of the three Newspaper Publishers Association representatives. The May 2014 minutes state that the secretariat's "engagement ... with The Guardian had continued to strengthen," with "regular dialogues between the Secretary and Deputy Secretaries and Guardian journalists"; that, "because of an agreement between The Guardian and allied publications overseas to coordinate their respective disclosures of Snowden material, advice given to The Guardian had been passed on to The New York Times and others"; and that "the process had culminated by the appointment of Paul Johnson (Deputy Editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC member."¹⁰

Johnson is listed as present at the meetings of May 8, 2014, November 6, 2014, November 5, 2015 and November 9, 2017, and as sending apologies for those of May 13, 2015, May 19, 2016, November 3, 2016 and May 17, 2018. The minutes of November 8, 2018 record that he had retired from the committee on October 30, 2018 and that the chairman thanked him, saying that he "had joined the Committee in the wake of the Snowden affair and had been instrumental in re-establishing links with the Guardian." The minutes of November 5, 2015 record that the secretary, Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds, had taken part with Ian Cobbain of the Guardian and Chris Hughes of the Daily Mirror in a media forum on "Reporting on the Secret State" at Goldsmiths, University of London, on October 29.¹¹ The minutes of the eleven meetings from May 2008 to May 2013 contain no reference to the Guardian. The committee's membership page on October 1, 2026 lists media members from the Society of Editors, The Times and Sunday Times, the Publishers Association, the Mail on Sunday, PA Media, the BBC, Sky News, ITV News, The Daily Telegraph and others, and none from the Guardian.¹²

On October 31, 2016, during the period of Johnson's membership, the Guardian published an interview with Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, by Ewen MacAskill and Paul Johnson, described as the first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's history. The article stated that Parker said he was talking to the Guardian "rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files" and "a consistent scepticism about the need for extra powers for the security services." The committee met on November 3, 2016, the last meeting of Vallance as secretary; Johnson sent apologies.¹³

WikiLeaks, 2011 and 2018

In September 2011 WikiLeaks published an editorial accusing the Guardian reporter David Leigh of disclosing in a book by himself and Luke Harding the password needed to decrypt a file of United States diplomatic cables. Leigh told the Associated Press the claim was "time-wasting nonsense" and said that Julian Assange had given him the password for a file expected to disappear within hours, that "what we published much later in our book was obsolete and harmless," and that the Guardian had not disclosed the location of the file. WikiLeaks posted on its Twitter feed that one of Leigh's statements was false.¹⁴

On November 27, 2018 the Guardian published a report by Luke Harding and Dan Collyns stating that "sources have said" Paul Manafort visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2013, 2015 and spring 2016. The report quoted Manafort: "I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him." It stated that WikiLeaks said the two had not met and that Assange described the story as a hoax. The page shows a last-modified date of February 26, 2020.¹⁵

Richard Gott and the KGB

Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB colonel, wrote in The Spectator of January 14, 1995 that the Guardian had responded to the Spectator's naming of its former features editor Richard Gott as a KGB agent of influence by attacking Gordievsky, that Gott had himself admitted taking "red gold" from the KGB, and that the KGB's senior officer in London, Igor Titov, had pressed the Central Committee's International Department for a 1983 trip to Moscow for the newspaper's leading journalists after Gott suggested it to him. Gordievsky named Gott, Rusbridger and Polly Toynbee among the journalists on the trip and wrote that their articles "were a terrible disappointment" to the Central Committee because they were "mostly very negative." He added: "The Guardian has never been a knowing conduit for KGB propaganda."¹⁶

The Legacies of Enslavement review

The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement Report, prepared by researchers at the Wilberforce Institute of the University of Hull following earlier research by the University of Nottingham and published in three parts, examined John Edward Taylor, the six funders of the Manchester Guardian it details and their business activities. Its second part states that all six funders detailed "were found to have indirect connections to transatlantic slavery," that an invoice book of the Strutt firm shows Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co. receiving raw cotton from the Sea Islands between August 14, 1822 and April 24, 1823, and that between 1817 and 1824 Taylor's firm received £2,300 1s 4d from the Strutts. The University of Hull's project page states that more than 300 enslaved people connected to the founders' plantations were named.¹⁷¹⁸

Guardian.org Foundation and other funders

The Guardian.org Foundation (EIN 81-2404459, Washington, D.C.) is a tax-exempt organization whose returns list Guardian News and Media LLC (EIN 99-0369208) as the recipient of grants described as support for theguardian.org "in establishing various projects." The Schedule I amounts in its returns for tax years 2016 through 2024 are $100,000, $85,000, $651,000, $1,230,000, $1,913,000, $2,050,000, $1,100,000, $3,055,000 and $1,940,000. The foundation's reported revenue rose from $552,000 in 2017 to $8,431,221 in 2024. Its board chairman for 2016 to 2018 was John Paton; from 2019 to 2024 the chairman was Asha Curran and the directors included Vivian Schiller, who was also a director of the Scott Trust Limited from 2015 to 2025, with Lois Quam, Alice Rhee and, from 2020, Cedric Brown.¹⁹

In Columbia Journalism Review on August 21, 2020 Tim Schwab wrote that his review of Gates Foundation grants found more than $250 million for journalism, with recipients including The Guardian and ProPublica.²⁰