Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul by Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon

Author:Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon [Thomas, Gordon & Dillon, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786712953
Google: Sm1TtAEACAAJ
Published: 2003-12-16T18:02:12+00:00

The knowledge that his financial salvation was so close, yet just out of his reach, must have added to the stress coming from all sides. His own newspaper, Moscow News, had launched an angry attack on him accusing him of using perestroika to further this own interests. Elsewhere he would have issued writs. But Moscow was not London and the paper’s editor was a close friend of Gorbachev. Maxwell endured his public humiliation and severed his links with the paper.

At home his repayments to his bankers had reached a staggering £415 million a year.

Once more he turned to Goldman Sachs for help. The bankers suggested he should sell shares in MCC. He said that would send ‘a wrong signal to the market’. A better idea would be for the bank once more to buy the shares secretly—showing there was active trading in them. Then he would again buy them back just as secretly. The bank would make its commission on the buy-and-sell. It was another win-win situation for Goldman Sachs.

When Betty learned from her son Kevin what had happened, she would tell her daughter, Isabel, ‘Kevin knows a great deal: that they sold very close to the wind. But what they did was not at the time actually illegal, although they positively ruined your father in the knowledge of what they were doing.’

Soon the bank had bought 50 million MCC shares. But Maxwell was showing no sign of buying them back. To do so he would need to borrow from other banks. He was once more caught in a vicious circle.

To break it Maxwell decided to move deeper into the mire. Lie would now beget lie. He announced he had sold two of his companies for £120 million. MCC shares began to move upwards, buoyed by this fictitious claim.

Maxwell and Senator John Tower returned to Bulgaria in December 1990, after Lukanov had resigned and Zhelyo Zhelev was appointed Prime Minister.

Maxwell had decided to establish good relations quickly with the incoming government while privately maintaining his links with Lukanov, his Neva point man.

The real purpose of his visit was to install Tower as member of the board of Maxwell’s Central and Eastern European Partnership.

In Sofia, Maxwell and Tower discussed establishing a joint venture between Bulgaria and the US telecommunications giants, AT&T and Sprint. Maxwell would use Pergamon-Brassey to handle that.

Another planned project was a Bulgarian holding company with a capital of £30 million. It would purchase American and British technical equipment to upgrade Bulgaria’s police and to be used in the country’s prisons. The equipment would be purchased through Pergamon-Brassey.

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