The company has warned shareholders that there will be effectively nothing left of the firm after the titles are sold.

Highbury said in an official statement: "Owing to the level of the company's indebtedness and other liabilities, following any sale of the trading activities in the group, it is highly unlikely that there will be any value attributable to the equity in the company."

City analysts have claimed that Highbury will be unlikely to get more than 8m from selling its remaining 30 titles, which include lads' mag Front (pictured) and Practical Woodworking.

This would mean that its lenders, Royal Bank of Scotland and Allied Irish Bank, could be saddled with over 20m worth of debt. This would leave shareholders such as Kelvin MacKenzie, the former Sun editor who ploughed 1.5m of his own money into the firm, with nothing.

Highbury's shares plummeted from a peak of 10p last spring to just 0.7p when trading was suspended in December. Its interim results revealed pre-tax losses of 11.8m in the first half of 2005.