Private equity firms sell out of Yell

Private equity firms Apax Partners and Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst have sold their entire stake in British phone directory publisher Yell for £720m (€1032m).

Investment banks Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, sold the firms' stake - which was just over a third of Yell's share capital - for 303p (€4.34) per share, representing a discount of 1.5% to the previous day's close.

Yell, previously a division of BT Group, is Britain's foremost publisher of directories and also the leading independent publisher in the US.

Yell also operates the online service Yell.com, a telephone information service and direct marketing from Yell Data.

The company went public in July 2003, and was the largest London share flotation for two years.