Robert Maxwell

Ian Robert Maxwell (born the June 10th 1923, deceased the November 5th 1991) is a British tycoon of press .

Biography

With his birth in the small village of Slatinské Dôly (then in Slovakia, today in Ukraine), Robert Maxwell has as a name Ján Ludvik Hoch . He is high within a poor Jewish family. At the time of the occupation of the area by the Third Reich, he managed to escape. Its family was on the other hand exterminated within the framework of the Shoah. It arrived at the the United Kingdom in 1940 as a young refugee, and engaged in the British Army. Intelligent and gifted for the languages, it succeeds in assembling the levels quickly. By obtaining the British citizenship, it changes name to be called Robert Maxwell.

Officer in the occupying forces of Berlin at the end of the war, it made profitable his relations to create various companies of trade. He proposed to publish in the world the scientific magazines of the German specialist publisher Springer Verlag, at one time when he was interdict with this editor to do it in his proper name. Benefitting from the success of this operation, it repurchased in 1951 the small editor Pergamon. Operating with the international level in the fields of the sale of encyclopedias and scientific magazines, Maxwell quickly managed to make fortune and to make to Pergamon an editor of weight.

He turned then to the policy in the Sixties, and was a noisy Labor deputy with the British House of Commons of 1964 with 1970. He was not re-elected, and was unpopular besides in his own parliamentary group, because of his abrupt manners perceived like arrogant.

As an editor, it lost its first confrontation against the Australia N Rupert Murdoch while not managing to repurchase the news weekly News off the World. Its sharp temperament and its style of very particular management supported an opaque management of its companies. In 1969, a report/ratio of an organization of control qualified it like inapt for the healthy management of a quoted on the stock exchange company, which had become the Pergamon. In cold with its shareholders, it lost control of it shortly after.

Being pressed on the Maxwell Foundation, flagship of his many companies based to the Liechtenstein, it found the control of the Pergamon in 1974. It repurchased in 1981 British Printing Company to make the group Maxwell Communications Corporation of it. By this skew it repurchased the group publishing the British newspaper of left The Daily Mirror, then the editor Reed International. Then with its apogee, it also had many participations in various activities, primarily in the field of the media. It also benefitted from its good relationships with the Eastern bloc to conclude from the trade agreements with these countries. It intervened enormously in the operations of each one of its groups and in the draftings of its newspapers. Seeing in them the possibility of diffusing its thought, it signed for example a leading article in The Daily Mirror, newspaper which did not have success that it hoped for.

It was one of the partners of Francis Bouygues in the privatization project of the French television channel TF1 in 1987, and it proposed its past of left and its experiment of the media to allure François Mitterrand within the framework of the repurchase of the chain. It appeared a demanding minority shareholder thereafter, to the great displeasure group Bouygues, which intended to have an autonomy in management.

Throughout its entrepreneurial course, it was perceived like a leader with the unhealthy practices, agglomerating companies with the doubtful financial health. Of alive sound, Robert Maxwell succeeds in making conceal criticisms and gaining in importance in the media landscape, where he wanted to be really influential. It appeared then that its group missed truly financial stability, and was built on the use of the debt. The failure of the transnational daily newspaper The European launched in 1990 forced it to sell Pergamon with the group Elsevier, but benefitted from the surge of funds to repurchase the New York Daily News. End 1990, of the journalists inquired into a possible diversion of the funds of the retirement pensions of the employees of its companies.

At the 68 years age, Maxwell would have fallen of his yacht whereas it was with broad of the Canary islands, and its body was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was buried with Jerusalem. The official cause of its death is the accidental drowning, but voices rose to call into question this diagnosis, speaking about murder or suicide. Among the many rumors surrounding this mysterious death, that indicating that it was an agent of the Mossad created a sharp polemic (on this subject to read secret Histoire of Mossad of Gordon Thomas). According to this book he was besides an eminent member of Mossad to which he granted financings by in particular diverting the pension funds of his group. He would have been killed whereas he wanted to recover the money that he had lent to Mossad. The Israeli secret services would have refused and eliminated it for fear it reveals on the public place many information that Maxwell knew.

Its companies did not survive to him: they went bankrupt and it appeared that in addition to their management considered as hazardous, Maxwell had also devoted himself to several financial embezzlements. The Maxwell group is mainly known today for its fast and total collapse.

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