Robert Maxwell
Ian Robert Maxwell was a Czechoslovak-born 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 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 life, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he often flew in his helicopter, or sailing on his luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter, the socialite and latterly convicted child sex offender 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 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 were deported to Auschwitz and perished there after Hungary's occupation by Nazi Germany in 1944. Years earlier Maxwell 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 took part in a protest against the leadership of the Czechoslovak Army, and with 500 other soldiers he was transferred to the British Army, initially to the Royal 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, 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 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 Worlds 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 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 in 1981 and changed its name first to the British Printing and Communication Corporation and then to the Maxwell Communication Corporation. 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, 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 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 communist 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?"
File:GlobalEconomicPanelAmsterdam1989.jpg|thumb|Global Economic Panel April 1989 in Amsterdam: Wisse Dekker, minister Hans van den Broek, Henry Kissinger and Robert Maxwell
File:Oxford brookes headington hill.JPG|thumb|For the last 32 years of his life, Maxwell lived at Headington Hill Hall, which he rented from Oxford City Council and described as "the best council house" in the country. It is now part of Oxford Brookes University.
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 case management software PROMIS was allegedly 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. 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.