Robert Maxwell
4ms
Ian Robert Maxwell. Born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch on June 10, 1923, he was a British media proprietor and politician. Of Jewish descent, he escaped the Nazi occupation of his native Czechoslovakia, joining the Czechoslovak Army in exile during World War II. He served with distinction in the British Army, earning decorations for his active service.
In the post-war years, Maxwell built Pergamon Press into a major academic publisher. After six years as a Labour Member of Parliament in the 1960s, he returned to business with renewed vigor, acquiring companies like the British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers, and Macmillan Inc.
Maxwell lived a life of opulence, residing at Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he’d often depart by helicopter, or sailing on his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell. He was known for his litigious nature and frequent controversies. In 1989, mounting debts forced him to sell profitable businesses, including Pergamon Press. In 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having apparently fallen from his yacht. His funeral on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives was a grand affair, attended by much of the Israeli political elite.
Maxwell's death sent shockwaves through his publishing empire, leading to banks recalling loans. His sons’ attempts to salvage the business failed when it emerged that Maxwell had embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds. The Maxwell companies sought bankruptcy protection in 1992, revealing massive financial discrepancies, including the fraudulent misappropriation of the Mirror Group pension fund.
Born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in Slatinské Doly, Czechoslovakia, on June 10, 1923, Maxwell hailed from a poor, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family. He was one of seven siblings. While his authorized biography claims a distant relation to Elie Wiesel, this has not been substantiated. Most of his relatives perished in Auschwitz after Hungary was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1944, but years earlier, he had escaped to France. In May 1940, he joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille.
Following the fall of France and the British retreat, Maxwell, under aliases like "Ivan du Maurier," protested the Czechoslovak Army's leadership. Transferred to the Pioneer Corps and then the North Staffordshire Regiment in 1943, he fought across Europe, from Normandy to Berlin, reaching the rank of sergeant. He was commissioned in 1945 and promoted to captain.
In January 1945, Maxwell's bravery in storming a German machine-gun nest earned him the Military Cross, presented by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. He then served in the press section of the Foreign Office in Berlin for two years. Maxwell naturalized as a British subject in 1946 and officially changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell in 1948.
In 1945, he married Elisabeth "Betty" Meynard, a French Protestant. They had nine children: Michael, Philip, Ann, Christine, Isabel, Karine, Ian, Kevin, and Ghislaine. Elisabeth later spoke of recreating the family Maxwell had lost in the Holocaust. Five of their children—Christine, Isabel, Ian, Kevin, and Ghislaine—would later work for his companies. Tragically, Karine died of leukemia at age three, and Michael, severely injured in a car crash at 15, never regained consciousness and died seven years later.
After the war, Maxwell leveraged his contacts in Allied occupation authorities to enter business, becoming the British and US distributor for scientific publisher Springer Verlag. In 1951, he acquired three-quarters of Butterworth-Springer, a minor publisher, renaming it Pergamon Press with Paul Rosbaud, and rapidly transforming it into a leading academic publishing house. Rosbaud departed in 1956 after a disagreement.
In 1964, representing the Labour Party, Maxwell was elected MP for Buckingham, and re-elected in 1966. He later commented that the House of Commons presented a challenge, finding it difficult to work with men but viewing women as an extension of the boss. He lost his seat in 1970 and failed to regain it in subsequent elections.
In early 1969, Maxwell's bid to acquire the tabloid newspaper News of the World failed. The Carr family, its owners, were reportedly incensed by the prospect of a socialist Czechoslovak immigrant gaining control. The paper’s editor, Stafford Somerfield, publicly opposed Maxwell’s bid, referencing his Czechoslovak origins and birth name, emphasizing the paper’s British identity. Rupert Murdoch eventually purchased the News of the World and The Sun, another paper that had interested Maxwell.
In 1969, Saul Steinberg of "Leasco Data Processing Corporation" sought to acquire Pergamon Press. During negotiations, Steinberg alleged Maxwell misrepresented the profitability of an encyclopedia publishing subsidiary. Simultaneously, Pergamon was forced to reduce its profit forecasts, leading to the suspension of its shares on the London stock market. Maxwell subsequently lost control of Pergamon and was expelled from the board in October 1969. An inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry concluded that Maxwell was "not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company," finding he had manipulated Pergamon's share price.
Concurrently, the U.S. Congress investigated Leasco's takeover practices. Judge Thayne Forbes criticized the DTI inquiry, suggesting it had become accusatory and acted contrary to natural justice. Pergamon faltered under Steinberg, and Maxwell reacquired it in 1974 with borrowed funds.
Maxwell established the Maxwell Foundation in Liechtenstein in 1970. He acquired the British Printing Corporation (BPC) in 1981, renaming it Maxwell Communication Corporation (MCC), which was later sold and is now known as Polestar.
In July 1984, Maxwell acquired Mirror Group Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mirror, for £113 million, sparking a media war with Rupert Murdoch. At a press conference, Maxwell pledged editorial freedom, though his new employees' journalist Joe Haines asserted he could prove his boss was a "crook and a liar," later writing his authorized biography.
In June 1985, Maxwell attempted to take over Sinclair Research, Clive Sinclair's home computer company, through a Pergamon subsidiary, but the deal collapsed. In 1987, he purchased part of IPC Media to form Fleetway Publications and launched the London Daily News, which closed six months later after sustaining significant losses.
In May 1987, Maxwell's BPCC made an unsolicited bid for U.S. publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ), which defended itself by taking on substantial debt. By 1988, Maxwell’s companies held interests in Nimbus Records, Maxwell Directories, Prentice Hall Information Services, Berlitz language schools, half of MTV Europe, and other European television ventures. He acquired the American firm Macmillan Inc. for $2.6 billion in 1988 and launched the transnational newspaper The European. In 1991, to cover debts, he sold Pergamon and Maxwell Directories to Elsevier for £440 million, using some funds to buy the ailing New York Daily News. That same year, he sold 49% of Mirror Group’s stock to the public.
Maxwell's controversial interviews with Eastern European leaders, including Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu, drew derision. He also served as chairman of Oxford United, saving them from bankruptcy and leading them to the top flight of English football and a League Cup victory. Fans chanted, "He's fat, he's round, he's never on the ground," referencing his helicopter landings near his office. He also bought into Derby County and attempted to buy Manchester United.
Pergamon Press, a Soviet-friendly firm, published numerous Soviet science books. A compromised version of the intelligence software PROMIS was sold for Soviet government use in the mid-1980s, with Maxwell acting as a conduit.
Maxwell was known for his litigiousness against critics. The satirical magazine Private Eye lampooned him as "Cap'n Bob" and the "bouncing Czech," a nickname originally coined by Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Maxwell launched several libel suits against Private Eye, one resulting in significant damages for the magazine. He retaliated with a spoof magazine, "Not Private Eye."
Hints of Maxwell's involvement with Israel emerged from John Loftus and Mark Aarons, who suggested his contacts with Czechoslovak communist leaders in 1948 were crucial to Czechoslovakia's decision to arm Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Maxwell's covert assistance in smuggling aircraft parts to Israel allegedly provided the country with air supremacy.
Maxwell is also alleged to have distributed a bugged version of the PROMIS software to various governments and financial institutions, enabling mass spying by Israel. He reportedly sold this compromised Israeli version to U.S. nuclear research facilities Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, allegedly using John Tower, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, to facilitate these sales.
The British Foreign Office suspected Maxwell of being a foreign agent, possibly a double or triple agent, and deemed him "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia." He had known connections to British intelligence (MI6), the Soviet KGB, and Israeli intelligence (Mossad). Shortly before his death, Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence employee, alleged Maxwell and the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, were long-time Mossad agents. Ben-Menashe claimed Maxwell informed the Israeli Embassy that Mordechai Vanunu had revealed information about Israel's nuclear capabilities to The Sunday Times and then the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad, convicted of treason, and imprisoned.
Journalist Seymour Hersh repeated some of these allegations, prompting Labour MP George Galloway and Conservative MP Rupert Allason to raise the issue in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege. Maxwell dismissed the claims as "ludicrous, a total invention" and fired Davies. The Washington Post reported that British and Israeli sources disputed Hersh's claims. A year later, in a libel settlement, Galloway accepted that Mirror Group staff were not involved in Vanunu's abduction, referring to Maxwell as "one of the worst criminals of the century."
On November 4, 1991, Maxwell had a heated phone call with his son Kevin regarding a meeting with the Bank of England concerning his default on £50 million in loans. Maxwell missed the meeting, instead traveling on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to the Canary Islands. On November 5, his last contact with the crew was at 4:25 a.m. local time. He was discovered missing later that morning. It's speculated he may have been urinating into the ocean, a habit he reportedly had. He was presumed to have fallen overboard. His naked body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, bearing no noticeable wounds aside from a "graze to his left shoulder."
An inquest in December 1991 ruled his death a heart attack combined with accidental drowning, though pathologists disagreed on the cause. Murder and suicide were ruled out. His son stated suicide was highly unlikely. Maxwell received a lavish funeral in Israel, attended by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, President Chaim Herzog, intelligence chiefs, and numerous dignitaries, and was buried on the Mount of Olives. British Prime Minister John Major described Maxwell as a "great character" who provided "valuable insights" into the Soviet Union. Labour leader Neil Kinnock spoke of his "zest for life" and his ability to attract "controversy, envy and loyalty." Tapes uncovered by a BBC production crew revealed Maxwell had become increasingly paranoid in his later years, bugging offices of employees he suspected of disloyalty.
Maxwell's death plunged his publishing empire into instability, with banks demanding repayment of loans. Despite his sons' efforts, the companies collapsed. It was revealed Maxwell had used hundreds of millions of pounds from pension funds to prop up Mirror Group shares, saving his companies from bankruptcy without proper authorization. Pension funds were eventually replenished by investment banks and the British government, with public funds partially covering the shortfall, meaning pensioners received about half their entitled company pension. The Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt with £400 million in debts. In 1995, Kevin, Ian, and two other directors were tried for conspiracy to defraud but were acquitted.
In November 1994, Maxwell's widow, Elisabeth, published her memoirs, "A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell." She passed away on August 7, 2013. In July 2020, his youngest child, Ghislaine Maxwell, was arrested and charged with federal crimes related to a sex trafficking ring with Jeffrey Epstein. She was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison in June 2022.
In popular culture, the British sitcom "The New Statesman" featured a running gag of Alan B'Stard believing Maxwell faked his death. Jeffrey Archer's 1996 novel "The Fourth Estate" was based on Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch. Maxwell inspired the villain Elliot Carver in the 1997 James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies." A one-person show about his life, "Lies Have Been Told," was performed in 2006. Juval Aviv's 2006 novel "Max" is based on his investigation into Maxwell's death. A 2007 BBC drama, "Maxwell," starring David Suchet, earned Suchet an International Emmy Award. Maxwell's pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev regarding the rights to the game Tetris was depicted in the 2023 film "Tetris." Jesse Armstrong, creator of "Succession," cited Maxwell's biography as an influence.
Copied!
Ian Robert Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch; 10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a British media proprietor and politician.
Of Jewish descent, he escaped the Nazi occupation of his native Czechoslovakia and joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile during World War II. He was decorated after active service in the British Army. In subsequent years he worked in publishing, building up Pergamon Press to a major academic publisher. After six years as a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) during the 1960s, Maxwell again put all his energy into business, successively buying the British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers and Macmillan Inc., among other publishing companies.
Maxwell led a flamboyant lifestyle, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he often flew in his helicopter, or sailing on his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter, the socialite and latterly convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was litigious and often embroiled in controversy. In 1989, he had to sell successful businesses, including Pergamon Press, to cover some of his debts. In 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having apparently fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives in what has been described as a state funeral, attended by much of the Israeli political establishment, including the President, Prime Minister, and six serving and former heads of intelligence.
Maxwell's death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire as banks called in loans. His sons briefly attempted to keep the business together, but failed as the news emerged that the elder Maxwell had embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies' pension funds. The Maxwell companies applied for bankruptcy protection in 1992. After Maxwell's death, large discrepancies in his companies' finances were revealed, including his fraudulent misappropriation of the Mirror Group pension fund.
== Early life ==
Robert Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in the small town of Slatinské Doly on the border with Romania, in the region of Carpathian Ruthenia in Czechoslovakia (now Solotvyno, Ukraine) on 10 June 1923. Like the rest of the then-newly formed Czechoslovakia, the area of Maxwell's birth and upbringing had been part of Austria-Hungary until early November 1918. The area was eventually annexed by Hungary in 1939.
Maxwell was born into a poor Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family and had six siblings. His authorised biography claims that he was also a distant relative of Elie Wiesel, but The Dispatch could find nothing to substantiate such a claim. Most of Maxwells' relatives died in Auschwitz after Hungary was occupied in 1944 by Nazi Germany, but years earlier he had escaped to France. In May 1940, he joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille.
After the fall of France and the British retreat to Britain, Maxwell (using the name "Ivan du Maurier", or "Leslie du Maurier", the surname taken from the name of a popular cigarette brand) took part in a protest against the leadership of the Czechoslovak Army, and with 500 other soldiers he was transferred to the Pioneer Corps and later to the North Staffordshire Regiment in 1943. He was then involved in action across Europe, from the Normandy beaches to Berlin, and achieved the rank of sergeant. Maxwell gained a commission in 1945 and was promoted to the rank of captain.
In January 1945, Maxwell's heroism in "storming a German machine-gun nest" won him the Military Cross (MC), presented by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. Attached to the Foreign Office, he worked in Berlin during the next two years in the press section. Maxwell naturalised as a British subject on 19 June 1946 and changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell by deed of change of name on 30 June 1948.
In 1945, Maxwell married Elisabeth "Betty" Meynard, a French Protestant, and the couple had nine children over the next sixteen years: Michael, Philip, Ann, Christine, Isabel, Karine, Ian, Kevin, and Ghislaine. In a 1995 interview, Elisabeth talked of how they were recreating Maxwell's childhood family who did not survive the Holocaust. Five of his children—Christine, Isabel, Ian, Kevin and Ghislaine—were later employed within his companies. Karine died of leukaemia at age three, while Michael was severely injured in a car crash in 1961, at age 15, when his driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed headlong into another vehicle. Michael never regained consciousness and died seven years later.
After the war, Maxwell used contacts in the Allied-occupation authorities to go into business, becoming the British and US distributor for Springer Verlag, a publisher of scientific books. In 1951, he bought three-quarters of Butterworth-Springer, a minor publisher; the remaining quarter was held by the experienced scientific editor Paul Rosbaud. They changed the name of the company to Pergamon Press and rapidly built it into a major academic publishing house. After a disagreement with Maxwell, Rosbaud left in 1956.
In the 1964 general election, representing the Labour Party, Maxwell was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham and re-elected in 1966. He gave an interview to The Times in 1968 in which he said the House of Commons provided him with a problem. "I can't get on with men", he commented. "I tried having male assistants at first. But it didn't work. They tend to be too independent. Men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of the boss." Maxwell lost his seat in 1970 to Conservative challenger William Benyon. He contested Buckingham again in both 1974 general elections, but without success.
At the beginning of 1969, it emerged that Maxwell's attempt to buy the tabloid newspaper News of the World had failed. The Carr family, which owned the newspaper, was incensed at the thought of a Czechoslovak immigrant with socialist views gaining ownership. The board voted against Maxwell's bid without any dissent. The News of the World's editor, Stafford Somerfield, opposed Maxwell's bid in an October 1968 front-page opinion piece in which he referred to Maxwell's Czechoslovak origins and used his birth name. He wrote, "This is a British paper, run by British people ... as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding ... Let us keep it that way". The paper was later purchased by the Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who later that year acquired The Sun, which had also previously interested Maxwell.
== Pergamon lost and regained ==
In 1969, Saul Steinberg, head of "Leasco Data Processing Corporation", was interested in a strategic acquisition of Pergamon Press. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations, Maxwell falsely stated that a subsidiary responsible for publishing encyclopedias was extremely profitable. At the same time, Pergamon had been forced to reduce its profit forecasts for 1969 from £2.5 million to £2.05 million during the period of negotiations, and dealing in Pergamon shares was suspended on the London stock markets.
Maxwell subsequently lost control of Pergamon and was expelled from the board in October 1969, along with three other directors in sympathy with him, by the majority owners of the company's shares. Steinberg purchased Pergamon. An inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) under the Takeover Code of the time was conducted by Rondle Owen Charles Stable and Sir Ronald Leach in mid-1971. The inquiry resulted in a report that concluded: "We regret having to conclude that, notwithstanding Mr Maxwell's acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company." It was found that Maxwell had contrived to inflate Pergamon's share price through transactions between his private family companies.
At the same time, the United States Congress was investigating Leasco's takeover practices. Judge Thayne Forbes in September 1971 was critical of the inquiry: "They had moved from an inquisitorial role to accusatory one and virtually committed the business murder of Mr. Maxwell." He further continued that the trial judge would probably find that the inspectors had acted "contrary to the rules of natural justice". Pergamon performed poorly under Steinberg; Maxwell reacquired the company in 1974 after borrowing funds.
Maxwell established the Maxwell Foundation in Liechtenstein in 1970. He acquired the British Printing Corporation (BPC) in 1981 and changed its name first to the British Printing and Communication Corporation (BPCC) and then to the Maxwell Communication Corporation (MCC). The company was later sold in a management buyout and is now known as Polestar.
== Later business activities ==
In July 1984, Maxwell acquired Mirror Group Newspapers, the publisher of six British newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, from Reed International plc. for £113 million. This led to a media war between Maxwell and Murdoch, the proprietor of the News of the World and The Sun. Mirror Group Newspapers (formerly Trinity Mirror, now part of Reach plc), published the Daily Mirror, a pro-Labour tabloid; Sunday Mirror; Sunday People; Scottish Sunday Mail and Scottish Daily Record. At a press conference to publicise his acquisition, Maxwell said his editors would be "free to produce the news without interference". Meanwhile, at a meeting of Maxwell's new employees, Mirror journalist Joe Haines asserted that he was able to prove that their boss was "a crook and a liar". Haines quickly came under Maxwell's influence and later wrote his authorised biography.
In June 1985, Maxwell announced a takeover of Clive Sinclair's ailing home computer company, Sinclair Research, through Hollis Brothers, a Pergamon subsidiary. The deal was aborted in August 1985. In 1987, Maxwell purchased part of IPC Media to create Fleetway Publications. The same year, he launched the London Daily News in February after a delay caused by production problems, but the paper closed in July after sustaining significant losses contemporary estimates put at £25 million. Originally intending it to be a rival of the Evening Standard, Maxwell eventually decided to make it the first 24-hour paper as well.
In May 1987, Maxwell's BPCC made an unsolicited bid to acquire US publishing conglomerate Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ). HBJ defended itself from the hostile takeover attempt by going deeply into debt to make large cash payments to shareholders. The strain of the debt was a factor in HBJ's 1989 sale of its theme park holdings to Anheuser-Busch. These theme park assets included the SeaWorld chain, which the company had purchased in 1976.
By 1988, Maxwell's various companies owned, in addition to the Mirror titles and Pergamon Press, Nimbus Records, Maxwell Directories, Prentice Hall Information Services and the Berlitz language schools. He also owned a half-share of MTV in Europe and other European television interests, Maxwell Cable TV and Maxwell Entertainment. Maxwell purchased Macmillan Inc, the American firm, for $2.6 billion in 1988. That same year, he launched an ambitious new project, a transnational newspaper called The European. In 1991, Maxwell was forced to sell Pergamon and Maxwell Directories to Elsevier for £440 million to cover his debts; he used some of this money to buy an ailing tabloid, the New York Daily News. The same year Maxwell sold forty-nine per cent of Mirror Group's stock to the public.
Maxwell's links with Eastern European totalitarian regimes resulted in several biographies of those countries' leaders, with interviews conducted by Maxwell, for which he received much derision. At the beginning of an interview with Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu, then the country's communist leader, he asked, "How do you account for your enormous popularity with the Romanian people?"
Maxwell was also the chairman of Oxford United, saving them from bankruptcy and attempting to merge them with Reading in 1983 to form a club he wished to call "Thames Valley Royals". He took Oxford into the top flight of English football in 1985, and the team won the League Cup a year later. Maxwell used the club's old grounds, close to his office at Headington Hill Hall, to land his helicopter—fans would chant, "He's fat, he's round, he's never on the ground". Maxwell also bought into Derby County in 1987. He attempted to buy Manchester United in 1984 but refused owner Martin Edwards's asking price.
Pergamon Press, a Soviet-friendly firm, published numerous Soviet science books in the West. A bugged version of the intelligence spy software PROMIS was sold in the mid-1980s for Soviet government use, with Maxwell as a conduit.
Maxwell was known to be litigious against those who would speak or write against him. The satirical magazine Private Eye lampooned him as "Cap'n Bob" and the "bouncing Czech", the latter nickname having originally been devised by Prime Minister Harold Wilson (under whom Maxwell was an MP). Maxwell took out several libel actions against Private Eye, one resulting in the magazine losing an estimated £225,000 and Maxwell using his commercial power to hit back with a one-off spoof magazine called Not Private Eye.
== Israeli support ==
=== 1948 war ===
A hint of Maxwell's service to Israel was provided by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, who described Maxwell's contacts with Czechoslovak communist leaders in 1948 as crucial to the Czechoslovak decision to arm Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Czechoslovak military assistance was both unique and crucial for Israel in the conflict. According to Loftus and Aarons, it was Maxwell's covert help in smuggling aircraft parts into Israel that led to the country having air supremacy during the war.
=== Distribution of PROMIS software to facilitate Israeli spying ===
Maxwell is alleged to have distributed a bugged version of a software, PROMIS, to a plethora of national governments and global financial institutions that enabled mass spying by the government of Israel.
Maxwell was allegedly able to sell the bugged Israeli version of the PROMIS software to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, two of the most important nuclear research and national security facilities in the United States. Maxwell allegedly employed John Tower, Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, to facilitate the sales of the bugged Israeli version of the PROMIS software to Sandia and Los Alamos.
=== Mossad allegations; Vanunu case ===
The British Foreign Office suspected Maxwell of being a secret agent of a foreign government, possibly a double agent or a triple agent, and "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia". He had known links to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), to the Soviet KGB, and to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
Shortly before Maxwell's death, Ari Ben-Menashe, a former employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate, approached a number of news organisations in Britain and the US with the allegation that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, were both long-time agents for Mossad. Ben-Menashe also claimed that, in 1986, Maxwell informed the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu revealed information about Israel's nuclear capability to The Sunday Times, then to the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad and smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for eighteen years.
Journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker repeated some of the allegations during a press conference in London held to publicise The Samson Option, Hersh's book about Israel's nuclear weapons. On 21 October 1991, Labour MP George Galloway and Conservative MP Rupert Allason (also known as espionage author Nigel West) agreed to raise the issue in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege protection, which in turn allowed British newspapers to report events without fear of libel suits. Maxwell called the claims "ludicrous, a total invention" and fired Davies. The Washington Post reported that sources in Britain and Israel disputed Hersh's claims.
A year later, in Galloway's libel settlement against Mirror Group Newspapers, Galloway's counsel announced that the MP accepted that the group's staff had not been involved in Vanunu's abduction. Galloway referred to Maxwell as "one of the worst criminals of the century".
== Death ==
On 4 November 1991, Maxwell had an argumentative phone call with his son Kevin over a meeting scheduled with the Bank of England on Maxwell's default on £50 million in loans. Maxwell missed the meeting, instead travelling on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to the Canary Islands, Spain. On 5 November, Maxwell was last in contact with the crew of Lady Ghislaine at 4:25 a.m. local time, but was found to be missing later in the morning. It has been speculated that Maxwell was urinating into the ocean nude at the time, as he often did. He was presumed to have fallen overboard from the vessel, which was cruising off the Canary Islands, south-west of Spain. Maxwell's naked body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and taken to Las Palmas. Besides a "graze to his left shoulder", there were no noticeable wounds on Maxwell's body.
The official ruling at an inquest held in December 1991 was death by a heart attack combined with accidental drowning, although three pathologists had been unable to agree on the cause of his death at the inquest; he had been found to suffer from serious heart and lung conditions. Murder was ruled out by the judge and, in effect, so was suicide. His son discounted the possibility of suicide, saying, "I think it is highly unlikely that he would have taken his own life, it wasn't in his makeup or his mentality." Maxwell was afforded a lavish funeral in Israel, attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence and many dignitaries and politicians, both government and opposition, and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Herzog delivered the eulogy, and the Kaddish was recited by his friend and longtime attorney Samuel Pisar.
British Prime Minister John Major said Maxwell had given him "valuable insights" into the situation in the Soviet Union during the attempted coup of 1991. He was a "great character", Major added. Neil Kinnock, then Labour Party leader, spoke of him as a man with "a zest for life" who "attracted controversy, envy and loyalty in great measure throughout his rumbustious life." A production crew conducting research for Maxwell, a 2007 biographical film by the BBC, uncovered tapes stored in a suitcase owned by his former head of security, John Pole. Apparently, later in his life Maxwell had become increasingly paranoid about his own employees and had the offices of those he suspected of disloyalty bugged so he could hear their conversations.
=== Aftermath of Maxwell's death ===
Maxwell's death triggered instability for his publishing empire, with banks frantically calling in their massive loans. Despite the efforts of his sons Kevin and Ian, the Maxwell companies soon collapsed. It emerged that, without adequate prior authorisation, Maxwell had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds to shore up the shares of the Mirror Group to save his companies from bankruptcy. Eventually, the pension funds were replenished with money from investment banks Lehman Brothers, Coopers & Lybrand, and Goldman Sachs, as well as the British government.
This replenishment was limited and also supported by a surplus in the printers' fund, which was taken by the government in part payment of £100 million required to support the workers' state pensions. The rest of the £100 million was waived. Maxwell's theft of pension funds was therefore partly repaid from public funds. The result was that in general, pensioners received about half of their company pension entitlement. The Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt with debts of £400 million. In 1995, Kevin, Ian and two other former directors went on trial for conspiracy to defraud, but were unanimously acquitted by a 12-person jury the following year.
== Family ==
In November 1994, Maxwell's widow Elisabeth published her memoirs, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, which sheds light on her life with him, when the publishing magnate was ranked as one of the richest people in the world. Having earned her degree from Oxford University in 1981, Elisabeth devoted much of her later life to continued research on the Holocaust and worked as a proponent of Jewish-Christian dialogue. She died on 7 August 2013.
In July 2020, Maxwell's youngest child, his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, was arrested and charged in New Hampshire with six federal crimes, involving minors' trade, travel, and seduction to engage in criminal sexual activity, and conspiracy to entice children to engage in illegal sex acts, linked to a sex trafficking ring with her close friend and partner Jeffrey Epstein (who had already died in jail the previous year). She was convicted on 29 December 2021, and sentenced to 20 years in prison on 28 June 2022.
== In popular culture ==
In the 1992 final series of the British sitcom The New Statesman, a recurring joke is Alan B'Stard's knowledge that Maxwell faked his death and is still alive. In the fifth episode, B'Stard visits war-torn Herzegovina, ostensibly to negotiate a peace treaty, but his plan all along has been to smuggle Maxwell out of the country to a luxury hideaway, in return for a handsome slice of the Mirror Group funds. It transpires, however, that Maxwell has already spent the money, and the episode ends with a vengeful B'Stard giving him "an amazing déjà-vu experience" by pushing him over the side of his yacht, where he presumably dies.
The Fourth Estate, a 1996 novel by Jeffrey Archer, is based on the lives of Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.
Maxwell, in addition to Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, was used as inspiration for the villainous media baron Elliot Carver in the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, as well as its novelisation and video game adaptation. At the film's conclusion, M orders a story spun disguising Carver's demise at Bond's hands, saying that Carver is believed to have committed suicide by jumping off his yacht in the South China Sea.
A one-person show about Maxwell's life, Lies Have Been Told, written by Rod Beacham, was performed by Phillip York at London's Trafalgar Studios in 2006.
Max, a 2006 novel by Juval Aviv, is based on Aviv's investigation into the death of Robert Maxwell.
A BBC drama, Maxwell, covering his life shortly before his death, starring David Suchet and Patricia Hodge, was aired on 4 May 2007. Suchet won the International Emmy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Maxwell.
Maxwell pressured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to cancel the contract between Elorg and Nintendo concerning the rights to the game Tetris, as he believed that his software company Mirrorsoft already owned the rights. In the 2023 film Tetris, which deals with the legal battles surrounding the game, Maxwell is portrayed by Roger Allam.
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong has stated that Maxwell's biography Maxwell: The Final Verdict was an influence in creating the series.
== See also ==
Daily News (Perth, Western Australia) §1980–1990
List of people who disappeared mysteriously at sea
Maxwellisation – English and Scots civil law practice
Scottish Daily News – Scottish newspaper published in 1975
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Short BBC profile of Robert Maxwell
Department of Trade and Industry report on Maxwell's purchase of the Mirror Group at the Wayback Machine (archived 28 October 2004)
Biography Ketupa.net, a media industry resource
Belton, Catherine (23 June 2020). Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0374238711.
Bower, Tom (1996). Maxwell: The Final Verdict. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-00-638424-2.
Bower, Tom (1992). Maxwell: The Outsider. Mandarin. ISBN 0-7493-0238-0.
Coleridge, Nicholas (March 1994). Paper Tigers: The Latest, Greatest Newspaper Tycoons. Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press. ISBN 9781559722155.
Greenslade, Roy (1992). Maxwell: The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell and His Empire. Carol Publishing. ISBN 1-55972-123-5.
Greenslade, Roy (2011). ""Pension plunderer Robert Maxwell remembered 20 years after his death"". The Guardian, 3 November 2011. Accessed 20 October 2013.
Haines, Joe (1988). Maxwell. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-48929-6.
Henderson, Albert, (2004) The Dash and Determination of Robert Maxwell, Champion of Dissemination, LOGOS. 15,2, pp. 65–75.
Hersh, Seymour (1991). The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House. ISBN 0-394-57006-5.
Thomas, Gordon; Dillon, Martin (2003). The Assassination of Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy. Robson Books. ISBN 978-1861055583.
Thomas, Gordon and Dillon, Martin. (2002). Robert Maxwell: Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul, Carroll and Graf, ISBN 0-7867-1078-0
Robert N. Miranda (2001) Robert Maxwell: Forty-four years as Publisher, in E. H. Frederiksson ed., A Century of Science Publishing, IOS Press ISBN 1-58603-148-1
Preston, John (2021). Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell. Penguin. ISBN 0-2413-8868-6.
== External links ==
Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Robert Maxwell
FBI Records: The Vault – Robert Maxwell
Opinion piece about the pension fund in the Independent in 1996
British Army Officers 1939–1945
Home
Languages