Maxwell, (Ian) Robert (1923-1991)

Czech-born British publishing and newspaper proprietor. He owned several UK national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror and People, as well as the Macmillan Publishing Company and the New York Daily News. He was also chairman of Oxford United Football Club (1982-87) and Derby County FC (1987-91). He was last seen alive on his yacht off the Canary Islands in November 1991, before drowning in unclear circumstances.

At the time of his death, Maxwell's companies had accumulated debts of about $4 billion. His empire subsequently collapsed and investigators discovered that he had been involved in fraudulent practices. It was revealed that he had siphoned off cash and assets from his public companies and from their pension funds into his network of private companies, with £400 million being misappropriated from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).

Born in Solotvino into a poor Jewish family, Maxwell received little formal education. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, he fought with resistance groups before escaping to the UK in 1940. Joining the Pioneer Corps of the British Army, he was commissioned in Normandy after D-Day and was later promoted to the rank of captain and awarded the Military Cross. The Nazis killed his parents and other close family members.

After the war he adopted the name Maxwell, and became a British citizen. In 1949 he founded Pergamon Press (which went public in the mid-1950s) as a publisher of scientific textbooks and journals. Maxwell attempted to sell Pergamon in 1969 to a US conglomerate, which later withdrew from the transaction claiming that he had misrepresented the company's profits for the previous three years. The UK Takeover Panel called for a full inquiry, and the subsequent Department of Trade and Industry report cost him his political career (Maxwell having been elected as a Labour MP for Buckingham in 1964). Although seriously in debt, Maxwell reorganized Pergamon in 1974, holding the company privately through the Maxwell Foundation. In 1981 his private companies took a controlling interest in the quoted but ailing British Printing Corporation, which Maxwell rationalized, returned to profit, and later renamed Maxwell Communications Corporation. In 1984 he acquired MGN from Reed International to compete against Australian-born US publisher Rupert Murdoch, who had beaten him to gain control of the mass market UK Sunday tabloid News of the World.

Maxwell then made a series of large acquisitions: he bought the Official Airline Guides from Dun & Bradstreet, and became the publisher of the English edition of Moscow News in 1988. Meanwhile his private companies bought stakes in the Hungarian newspapers Esti Hirlap and Magyar Hirlap (he owned 40% of the latter from 1989), the German Berliner Verlag company, and the Israeli Maariv. In 1990 he launched the weekly European and bought the US book publisher Macmillan. By the time he bought the New York Daily News, which was on the verge of closure after a bitter labour dispute, in 1991, Maxwell was facing a financial crisis; his companies were not generating sufficient profits to meet the large debts incurred by some of his acquisitions.

Maxwell decided to float 49% of MGN, but failed to raise enough cash (about £200 million) to repair his finances. There were already rumours about his indebtedness and he had mounted a share support operation to see the issue through. As the crisis deepened, Maxwell began to default on his loans and his bankers prepared to sell shares in his companies, which had provided security for his borrowings.