About Robert Maxwell
Ian Robert Maxwell (10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a Czechoslovak-born British-French media proprietor and politician. Of Jewish descent, he escaped the Nazi occupation of his native Czechoslovakia and joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile during the Second World War. 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 serving as a Labour member of Parliament from 1964 to 1970, Maxwell again put all his energy into business, successively buying the British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) 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 sailed on his luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter Ghislaine. He 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, near the Canary Islands, having apparently fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in a high-profile funeral attended by members of the Israeli political establishment, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, President Chaim Herzog, and dignitaries like Natan Sharansky. 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. His daughter Ghislaine was convicted in 2021 for trafficking young girls to the financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 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. 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). In 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having apparently fallen overboard from his yacht. He was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell.
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