Media mogul Richard Desmond took extra £69m out of Channel 5 just before he sold to US firm Viacom for £450m

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Media mogul Richard Desmond took an extra £69.1 million out of Channel 5 just before he sold it to US firm Viacom for £450 million, new figures reveal.

The Daily Express and OK! magazine owner last year sold what was Britain’s fifth terrestrial TV station to Viacom, which owns music video channel MTV, Comedy Central and children’s channel Nickelodeon.

New figures show that Desmond took the cash as an interim dividend, payable to a subsidiary of his Northern & Shell group in January 2014, when he put the broadcaster up for sale.

In the money: New figures show that Richard Desmond took the Channel 5 cash as an interim dividend

It sold for £450 million in May that year with the deal completed in September, four years after Desmond bought the station for £103.5 million from German group RTL. Viacom is understood to have taken account of the payment when it bought Channel 5, which is home to Celebrity Big Brother as well as Australian soap opera Neighbours.

The new figures cover the nine months to the end of September last year – Viacom took control on September 10 – and bring Channel 5’s accounting period in line with its US parent.

They show that Channel 5, which was launched in 1997, made an operating profit of just £5.2 million in the period and a pre-tax loss of £12.9 million, caused by Viacom writing down the value of some of Channel 5’s programme rights, including an £18 million writedown on Dallas, a revived version of the 1980s US soap opera.

Turnover at the broadcaster was £240 million for the nine months to September last year, compared with £361.6 million for the whole of 2013.

Earlier this year Viacom struck a deal with satellite broadcaster Sky for its Sky Media advertising sales arm to handle advertising sales for Channel 5 for the next five years.

This followed a long dispute with US advertising sales giant Omnicom, which pulled £30 million of its clients’ advertising from Channel 5 last year, including commercials from McDonald’s, Vodafone and Apple. This deal is expected to put Channel 5 on course to return to pre-tax profits.

The deal gives Sky Media as much clout as Channel 4’s advertising sales operation at 27 per cent of the TV ad sales market, though ITV is the biggest player with 46 per cent.