Maxwell’s trail of ruin lives on 34 years after his death
Dead these 34 years, I thought, but the wicked bastard is still causing trouble.
I am talking about Robert Maxwell: newspaper mogul, publisher, spy, thief, bully, charlatan and Bond villain (okay, I did a Rachel there and sweetened the CV; but the job was his for the asking).
Maxwell stole £440 million from the Mirror pension fund to support his crumbling empire and his grand larceny was not uncovered until he vanished from his yacht in 1991.
The theft caused a revolution in the pensions industry and led to the introduction of new safeguards to prevent sticky-fingered employers dipping into their workers’ savings.
Maxwell’s plundering is still reverberating at the headquarters of Mirror owners Reach three decades later. It turns out The Pensions Regulator (TPR) has been forced to step in to make sure that Reach, formerly Trinity Mirror, boosts payments to the Mirror pension scheme.
The fund, with 5,490 members, has a shortfall of £219 million and asked Reach to raise its payments. The company declined, financial editor Patrick Hosking reported in The Times last week.
TPR ordered the company and the fund to continue negotiations and threatened formal enforcement action against Reach, which could include fines or criminal prosecutions.
Reach responded by promising to pay an extra £25.5 million into the scheme over five years. It now pays a total of £46 million a year in “repair payments” to the fund.
The company, which also owns the Daily and Sunday Express and the Daily Star, has struggled with an albatross of debt, some of it left by Maxwell’s cheating. It has a market value of £251 million and pension liabilities of £1.25 billion.
Reach would not comment but referred to a statement by chief executive Jim Mullen a year ago. He said then: “We… took decisive action to resolve the outstanding pension funding valuations, which has similarly given us a firm end in sight for an obligation that has hindered this organisation for several decades.”
The Times quoted an independent pensions consultant, John Ralfe, who said two-thirds of Reach’s operating cashflow was now being used to plug the deficit.
“Given its weak covenant, the size of deficit and the size of cash contributions required, the pension scheme is in a fragile position,” he said.
“It remains to be seen if it will end up being fully funded by 2028, as the regulator suggests.”
Maxwell’s death was as shady and mysterious as his life. My friend Gordon Thomas, an author and former Daily Express reporter, co-wrote a book suggesting that the old rogue, known as The Bouncing Czech, did not fall accidentally from his yacht but was assassinated by Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad.
Thomas wrote the book with Martin Dillon, a respected Belfast-born investigative reporter, who chronicled the pitiless outrages of The Troubles, including books on the infamous Protestant Shankill Butchers gang and Michael Stone, who tried to kill Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams at an IRA funeral in Milltown Cemetery, Belfast, in 1988.
Dillon, now 75, who had sources inside East European intelligence agencies and the FBI, disclosed Maxwell’s connections to the KGB in the Cold War years.
Thomas, who died in 2017, aged 84, wrote Gideon’s Spies, the definitive book on the Mossad and could use his contacts to reveal how Maxwell sealed his own fate by threatening his spymasters in the legendary organisation.
Maxwell had been a great friend to Israel. He was born Jan Hoch to a poverty-stricken family of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews in Czechoslovakia and fled the Nazis. He joined the British Army, won a Military Cross for storming a German machine-gun post and reached the rank of Captain.
As his business flourished and he began to mix with presidents and tycoons, he could relay tittle-tattle, some of it useful intelligence, to the Mossad. He is said to have distributed a bugged Israeli version of a software called PROMIS to banks and foreign government departments, which allowed Israel to spy on them.
He also told Mossad that Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician, had revealed secrets about Israel’s nuclear capabilities to The Sunday Times and the Daily Mirror. Mossad agents kidnapped him and he spent 18 years in prison.
But later, heavily in debt, Maxwell went to senior Mossad officers and demanded that they help him by using their contacts and influence to persuade the banks to lend him £400 million. Or else.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence adviser, told Thomas that it was “clear he was saying he would blow the whistle on all he knew about Mossad. That was a threat no one could expect to get away with.”
Some time between 4 and 5am on November 5, according to Thomas, a dinghy carrying three frogmen approached Maxwell’s yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. Using a rubberised grappling hook, they pulled alongside the port side and two of them boarded the yacht.
Maxwell was at the stern on the starboard side, a favourite spot of his. One of the frogmen produced a pouch containing a syringe loaded with a lethal nerve agent – and plunged it into Maxwell’s neck behind his right ear.
Then they hauled his body to the stern of the yacht and slipped it into the ocean off the Canary Islands. Israel’s problem was solved. The Mossad had silenced the tycoon. The official version of events was that Maxwell had a heart attack and fell off the yacht.
His body was taken to Gran Canaria, where Express reporter Ashley Walton talked his way into the morgue and saw Maxwell lying on a slab. Later in a phone call with the news desk, he relayed the sound of a pathologist sawing through Maxwell’s skull.
Maxwell, a father of nine, was a tyrant even at home. He betrayed his wife Betty, from a distinguished French Huguenot family, with numerous mistresses. He crushed his sons, Ian and Kevin, with the force of his personality and the weight of his expectation.
He belittled and humiliated his daughters. Except for one. Ghislaine was his favourite, a Daddy’s girl with, it turned out, a Daddy complex. Maxwell named his magnificent yacht after her.
But Ghislaine went on to become the “fixer” for Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious paedophile financier. She provided Epstein with a steady supply of young girls, whom she had personally groomed.
Friendship with Epstein ruined Prince Andrew and tainted Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Barclays Bank chief Jes Staley. Ghislaine Maxwell, a beautiful, Oxford-educated socialite, is now serving 20 years in a Florida prison for sex trafficking and other offences.
Robert Maxwell was also a man of vile personal habits. His helicopter would land on the roof of the Daily Mirror building in Holborn Circus and Maxwell would step out, walk to the parapet and urinate onto the street below before descending to his office.
And you would not want to be the maid who had to gather up the towels left scattered in the bathroom of his suite in whichever luxurious hotel he happened to be staying. It was not a job for the faint of heart.
Whether or not it was the Mossad that rid the world of the brutish Maxwell, Israel showed its gratitude for his espionage skills and endeavour. He was granted a funeral befitting a head of state.
Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was there, along with past and present heads of Israeli intelligence. President, Chaim Herzog, delivered the eulogy and Maxwell was buried on the hallowed Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Six feet under but still raising hell for those trying to settle the chaos he left behind.
*The Assassination of Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, published by Robson Books
RICHARD DISMORE
18 March, 2025
