Maxwell, The Outsider by Tom Bower

Author:Tom Bower [Bower, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non Fiction
ISBN: 9780670846542
Publisher: New York : Viking, 1992.
Published: 1992-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Within days, the report's existence was widely known, and pressure intensified, especially from the City, for its immediate release. Lord Shawcross even allowed himself to be named as one of those lobbying the Minister. On 13 July, the Minister agreed. The report was published, sweeping aside Maxwell's imminent re-election to the Pergamon board and changing his life forever.

Stable and Leach had adopted a style which would do credit to the author of a pot-boiling thriller. Under headings such as 'A False Statement', 'Another False Statement', 'More Misleading Statements' and 'Still More Misleading Statements' they wove a gripping narrative which suggested that ILSC was negligently and deceitfully managed. None of the revelations in their 209-page report would attract more attention than the chapter entitled 'A Remarkable Sale'.

The date of the 'remarkable sale' was 30 June 1968, the day on which Pergamon, under certain circumstances, became liable to compensate BPC if ILSC's profits did not total £500,000. The sale was for no less than five thousand complete sets of New Caxton encyclopaedias at $70 per set. ILSC's customer was Pergamon's own subsidiary, PPI in New York. At ILSC's board meeting the following day to review the company's profits, Maxwell, according to the inspectors, made no mention of that crucial sale. The inspectors also claimed that on that day ILSC neither had a written order for that sale nor even possessed that number of sets 'in a deliverable state'. The sale, they believed, was arranged in autumn 1968 and 'deliberately ante-dated so that the profit on the so-called sale could be credited to ILSC in the warranty period which ended on the 30th June 1968'. It amounted to a charge that Maxwell was guilty of deception. (Maxwell vigorously denies that the sale was ever credited to ILSC's profits and insists that the inspectors ignored his evidence that ILSC did not make a profit on the transaction, and that he had notified the ILSC board. He has repeatedly criticised the correctness of the inspectors' finding.)

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