Maxwell: The Final Verdict

The principal cause of indebtedness was the $3.35 billion spent by Maxwell in 1988 on the ‘Big One’, as his excitable American banker Robert Pirie called it. The money had bought Official Airline Guides (OAG) for $750 million and, more importantly, after an intense and successful public battle with Henry Kravis, the famous pixie-like arbitrageur, the Macmillan publishing group for $2.6 billion. Pirie had throughout stoked Maxwell’s burning sense of triumph.

Pirie, the chief executive of Rothschild Inc., had played on Maxwell’s weaknesses. ‘If you want to be in the media business,’ advised the Rothschild banker, ‘you’ve got to be prepared to pay the price.’ He did not add that he would earn higher fees if Maxwell won. Telling his client, ‘You’re paying top dollar,’ Pirie did not discourage him from going for broke. Maxwell’s self-imposed deadline for joining the Big Ten League, alongside his old rival Rupert Murdoch, would expire in just thirteen months. Intoxicated by the publicity of spending $3 billion, he crossed the threshold without considering the consequences. ‘Plays him like a puppet,’ sniped one who was able to observe Pirie’s artful sycophancy. To Pirie, Maxwell had not overpaid. There were, in the jargon of that frenetic era, ‘enormous synergies’ and the Publisher himself did not even consider his plight as a debtor owing $3 billion. After all, Pirie boasted, ‘Maxwell had no credibility problem with the lending banks.’ But the Rothschild banker disclaimed any responsibility for the other deal. ‘He paid too much for OAG,’ he later volunteered, adding unconvincingly, ‘The deal was done by Maxwell, not me.’

Forty-four banks had lent Maxwell $3 billion, hailed by all as proof of his return to respectability. Astonishingly, the giant sum was not initially secured against any assets. He could lose all that cash without more than a blink. The interest rates, moreover, were a derisory 0.5 per cent over base rate. The deal was a phenomenal bargain negotiated through Crédit Lyonnais and Samuel Montagu by Richard Baker, MCC’s gruff deputy managing director, who had been born in Shepherds Bush, west London. Maxwell had inherited Baker when he bought the British Printing Corporation (BPC), Britain’s biggest printers, in an exquisite dawn raid in 1980.

Maxwell’s victory was more than commercial. Despite his infamous branding as a pariah by British government inspectors in 1971, which had cast him into the wilderness, Maxwell had re-established his respectability and acceptability among most in the City. Here was the reincarnation of what had long ago been unaffectionately dubbed ‘The Bouncing Czech’. Leading the supporters was the Nat West Bank, his bankers since 1945, who were impressed by the way their client had crushed the trade unions at BPC, restoring the company to robust profitability. Now the ‘Jumbo Loan’ was the world financial community’s statement of faith in Maxwell. ‘All the banks were clamouring to join the party,’ recalled Ron Woods, Maxwell’s soft-spoken Welsh tax adviser and a director of MCC. Bankers judged MCC to be not only an exciting but a safe company. Former enemies had become allies – and over the years he had collected many enemies. Their numbers had multiplied after 1969 when he had sold Pergamon Press, his scientific publishing company, to Saul Steinberg, a brash young New York tycoon. Since Maxwell was a publicity-seeking, high-profile Labour member of parliament, the deal had attracted unusual attention. Pergamon, Maxwell’s brainchild, was a considerable international success, elevating its owner into the rarefied world of socialist millionaires.

But within weeks the take-over was plunged in crisis. Steinberg’s executives had discovered that Maxwell’s accounts were fraudulent, shamelessly contrived to project high profits and conceal losses. In the ensuing storm of opprobrium, Maxwell was castigated by the Take-Over Panel, lost control of Pergamon and was investigated by two inspectors appointed by the Department of Trade and Industry. In their first report published in 1971, the inspectors, after reminding readers that Maxwell had been censured in 1954 by an official receiver for trading as a book wholesaler while insolvent, revealed that his confidently paraded finances were exercises in systematic dishonesty. Their final conclusion was to haunt Maxwell for the rest of his life:

He is a man of great energy, drive and imagination, but unfortunately an apparent fixation as to his own abilities causes him to ignore the views of others if these are not compatible.… The concept of a Board being responsible for policy was alien to him.

We are also convinced that Mr Maxwell regarded his stewardship duties fulfilled by showing the maximum profits which any transaction could be devised to show. Furthermore, in reporting to shareholders and investors, he had a reckless and unjustified optimism which enabled him on some occasions to disregard unpalatable facts and on others to state what he must have known to be untrue.…

We regret having to conclude that, notwithstanding Mr Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied upon to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.

Even before that excruciating judgment was published, most City players had deserted Maxwell or refused his business. Ostracized, he did not begin to shrug off his pariah status until July 1980, when he succeeded in his take-over bid for the near-bankrupt British Printing Corporation (partly financed by the National Westminster bank). Within two years, his brutal but skilful management had transformed Britain’s biggest printers into a profitable concern, laying the foundations for his purchase of the Mirror Group in 1984.

Building on that apparent respectability, the financial community had cast aside their doubts and contributed to the Jumbo Loan. Among his closest advisers were Rothschilds, his bankers, who had shunned him after 1969; his accountants were Coopers and Lybrand, one of the world’s biggest partnerships; and among his lawyers was Bob Hodes of Wilkie Farr Gallagher, who had led the litigation against him in 1969. For Hodes, a scion of New York’s legal establishment, Maxwell had become ‘a likeable rogue who appeared to enjoy the game’. Like all the other professionals excited by the sound of gunfire, Hodes was confident that he could resist any pressure from Maxwell to bend the rules.

A celebration lunch when the Jumbo Loan had been rearranged was held at Claridge’s on 23 October 1989 by Fritz Kohli, of the Swiss Bank Corporation. The champagne had flowed as successive toasts and speeches showered mutual congratulations upon Maxwell and his banks. The Publisher had been gratified, especially by the presence of Senator John Tower and Walter Mondale, the former US vice-president, both of them anxious to become his paid lobbyists. Everyone was excited by the star because he was a dealmaker and deals generated headlines and income. Few bothered to consider that behind the deals there was little evidence of any considered strategy or of diligent management. But even then, unknown to the bankers, the consequences of that weakness were already apparent and Maxwell’s grandiose ambitions were faltering. Unexpectedly high interest rates, a worldwide recession and a fall in stock market prices were gradually devastating his finances.

One option for salvation was to adopt Rupert Murdoch’s solution. Maxwell’s bugbear had confessed his financial problems to his banks and had renegotiated the repayment of his $7.6 billion loans. Maxwell rejected that remedy. The wilfully blind would blame his vanity but, in retrospect, others understood his secret terror of having the banks inspect his accounts. The result would have been not a sensible rearrangement but merciless castration. Ever since 1947 when he had first launched himself into business, Maxwell had massaged profits, concealed losses and siphoned off cash by running several companies in parallel and organizing spurious deals within his empire. This manipulation was possible because only he, at the centre of the web, saw the total picture. Renowned as a master-juggler, he was blessed with a superb memory, perfectly focused amid the deliberate confusion, ordering obedient and myopic accountants to switch money and companies through a bewildering jungle of relationships.

By 1990, those trades had come to infect the interlocking associations between the complex structure of the tycoon’s 400 private companies and Maxwell Communication Corporation, the publicly quoted company. The disease was his insatiable ambition. He wanted to be rich, famous, powerful, admired, respected and feared. His empire was to reflect those desires. The means to that end were MCC’s ever increasing profits, which in turn determined the company’s share price. That relationship was the triple foundation of his survival, his dishonesty and his downfall. Whenever the profits were in danger, Maxwell resorted to a ruse which exposed his instinct for fraud: he pumped his personal money into the public company. Since 1987, he had bought with private funds bits of MCC at inflated prices to keep its profits and share price high. Invariably, he was buying the unprofitable bits.

To pay for that extravagance, Maxwell had borrowed money. By 1989, his private empire – unknown to outsiders – was on the verge of insolvency. As security for the loans, he had pledged to banks his 60 per cent stake in MCC. Unfortunately for him, by November 1990 growing suspicion of his accounts and critical newspaper reports had triggered a slide in the value of MCC shares, which over three years had fallen from 387p to a new low of 142p. The latest discontent in early October intensified Maxwell’s crisis. As his financial problems grew and MCC’s share price fell, the banks demanded more security for their loans. Maxwell’s solution was radical and initially secret. To keep the share price high, he had undertaken two bizarre and contradictory strategies. First, MCC was paying shareholders high dividends to make the shares an attractive investment. But the Publisher’s insoluble problem was that the dividends which MCC paid out were actually higher than the company’s profits. In 1989, the dividend cost £112.3 million, while the profits from normal trading were £97.3 million. Among the necessary costs of maintaining that charade was payment of advance corporation tax which in 1989 amounted to £17.6 million. The extraneous tax cost for the same ruse in 1990 was £98.8 million on adjusted trading profits of £71.1 million.

Maxwell’s second strategy to keep the share price high was to buy MCC shares personally. Since 1989 he had quietly spent £100 million in that venture. The solution bred several problems, not least that he soon ran out of cash. His response was to borrow more money to buy his own shares.

To their credit, both father and son could still rely upon the large residue of goodwill among leading bankers in all the major capitals – London, New York, Tokyo, Zurich, Paris and Frankfurt – and upon those bankers’ conviction that MCC’s debts were manageable. Their guarantee, they believed, was the vast private fortune of Robert Maxwell’s privately owned companies secreted in Liechtenstein. Although none of those bankers had ever seen the accounts of his Liechtenstein trusts, they believed they had no reason to doubt the Publisher’s boasts. Maxwell continued to encourage their credulity, while using banks in the Dutch Antilles and Cayman Islands as the true, secret receptacles of his wealth.

Among that army of bankers was Andrew Capitman, an ambitious manager of Bankers Trust, the American bank. Two years earlier, Capitman had purposefully moved to London to earn his fortune pleasing Maxwell in the course of completing thirty-eight separate transactions. Not surprisingly, he enjoyed the Concorde and first-class flights across the world, the heaps of caviar and champagne, all funded by his client. He too assumed that the Liechtenstein billions were the source of Maxwell’s cash for another unusual transaction to be completed at noon on 5 November 1990, just three hours before the seizure of the Berlitz shares.

Descending from his office on the ninth floor, Maxwell hurriedly chaired an extraordinary general meeting of MCC in the Rotunda on the mezzanine floor of the ugly Mirror headquarters in Holborn. The topic was one of Maxwell’s more expensive inter-company deals. Two Canadian companies, owned by MCC, were to be sold. And, because the recession meant that the price offered by others would be low, Maxwell proposed himself (or rather the Mirror Group, which he still privately owned) as the purchaser. Capitman understood that Maxwell’s strategy in that bizarre arrangement was to boost MCC’s profits and he had independently valued the two Canadian paper and print companies, Quebecor and Donohue, at a high £135 million. In return for offering a ‘slam-dunk’ generous valuation, the banker pocketed a cool $700,000 fee.

Capitman’s assumption that the £135 million was drawn from the Liechtenstein billions was erroneous. The true source of the £400 million Maxwell required to buy a succession of companies in similar deals from MCC during the following year was his own private loans – an unsustainable burden on his finances.

Among his most important lenders was Goldman Sachs, the giant New York bank. Of the many Goldmans executives with whom Maxwell spoke, none seemed more important that Eric Sheinberg, a fifty-year-old senior partner and graduate of Pennsylvania University. Sheinberg arrived in London in 1987 after a profitable career in New York and Singapore. For the hungry young traders in Goldman Sachs’ London office, which was sited near Maxwell’s headquarters, Sheinberg not only provided leadership but inspired trust. Trained by Gus Levy, a legendary and charismatic Wall Street trader, he was renowned for having made a killing trading convertible equities. ‘Eric’s a trader’s trader,’ was the admiring chant among his colleagues. Eric, it was said, had once confided that Goldmans was his first love: his formidable wife had to take second place. After losing successive internal political battles and suffering some discomfort after a colleague had been indicted for insider trading, Sheinberg, an inventor of financial products for the unprecedented explosion in the bull market, was now seeking the business of London’s leading players in the wake of the City’s deregulatory Big Bang. Few were bigger than Maxwell.

Goldmans already enjoyed a relationship with Maxwell. In 1984, the bank had rented office space from him in Holborn, and Sheinberg had organized the financing of his purchase of the Philip Hill Investment Trust in 1986. Despite some misgivings, Goldmans had also welcomed the business of floating 44 per cent of Berlitz in 1989, although the negotiations over the price had provoked deep antagonism, especially against Kevin. To prove his macho credentials, the son had telephoned the banker responsible at 4 a.m. New York time, to quibble about the price. ‘Both Maxwells behaved appallingly,’ recalled one of those involved. ‘Kevin worst of all. We soon hated them.’

Yet Maxwell’s business was too good to reject. The echo of the lawyers’ cries in Maxwell House – ‘Bob’s been shopping!’ – whenever the Chairman’s settlement agreements arrived from stockbroking firms, encouraged brokers like Sheinberg to seek his lucrative business. Although Sheinberg was renowned for his dictum, ‘There are no friends in the business, and I don’t trade on the basis of friendship,’ his staff in London noticed an unusual affinity between him and Maxwell. Some speculated that the link lay in their mutual interest in Israel, while others assumed it was just money. Maxwell was a big, brave gambler, playing the markets whether with brilliant insight or recklessness for $100 million and more a time, and Sheinberg was able to offer expertise, discretion and – fuelling his colleagues’ gossip – the unusual practice of clearing his office whenever Maxwell telephoned. Their kinship extended, so the gossip suggested, to Sheinberg’s readiness to overnight in Maxwell’s penthouse, to ride in Maxwell’s helicopter and even to use Maxwell’s VIP customs facilities at Heathrow airport – suggestions which Sheinberg denied.

Acting as a principal and occasionally as an adviser, Sheinberg had already undertaken a series of risks which had pleased Maxwell. On the bank’s behalf, the broker had bought 25 million MCC shares and, in controversial circumstances in August 1990, as MCC’s price hovered around 170p, he had bought another 15.65 million shares as part of a gamble with Maxwell that the price would rise. Maxwell had channelled the money for that transaction through Corry Stiftung, one of his many Liechtenstein trusts. In the event, the Publisher had lost his gamble and Goldman Sachs had been officially reprimanded for breaking the City’s disclosure regulations. That, however, Sheinberg blamed upon Goldmans’ back office, since fulfilling the legal requirements was not his responsibility. Nevertheless, by November 1990, the bank was holding 47 million MCC shares, a testament of faith which could be judged as either calculated or reckless.

As the pressure on Maxwell increased, rival traders in London watched on their screens as, at precisely 2.30 p.m. every afternoon, Goldman Sachs ‘hoovered up all the available MCC shares’. The bank’s commitment went further than was normal for a market-maker. In gratitude for the vast speculative foreign exchange deals bestowed by Maxwell on John Lopatin, a Goldman Sachs foreign exchange executive, and for Maxwell’s considerable share trading, the bank’s loans were mounting. ‘I don’t promise what I can’t deliver,’ quipped Sheinberg to the Publisher, keen to emphasize his blue-sky honesty. To Sheinberg’s staff, though, it seemed that the American was close to Maxwell, more like a colleague than a pure broker. But Sheinberg, privy to so much, knew only what suited his secretive client. The Chinese walls throughout Maxwell House were so thick that only Kevin and a handful of accountants and investment advisers in his private office were permitted to transcend the deliberate compartmentalization. Inevitably, the secrecy bred loneliness.

Maxwell’s loneliness was aggravated by the absence of Andrea Martin, his small, demure personal assistant whose unexpected promotion from receptionist had been won after she spoke impressive French during a trip to Paris. For nearly four years until May 1990, the blonde Martin had uncomplainingly worked arduous hours, travelled extraordinary distances and loyally kept those secrets which Maxwell divulged. At the end of the working day, when he retired to his bedroom in the penthouse, Martin would enter, kick off her shoes and sit on the sofa while her boss ordered refreshments from Douglas Harrod, his entertainment manager: ‘Let’s have never ending champagne, Douglas, and smoked salmon and caviar.’ The tall, benign, well-dressed butler, whom Maxwell had gleefully poached from Rupert Murdoch, would oblige with an obedient smile. After supervising the delivery of his master’s order, he would close the heavy double doors. Maxwell, he realized, was ‘besotted by Andrea’. Harrod was less clear what Andrea Martin ‘could see in someone like Robert Maxwell except a high salary’. But he had noticed a special relationship of ‘endearments and those sort of things’. However, those days had sadly passed. In the aftermath, Andrea Martin always insisted that their relationship had been strictly professional.

A few months earlier, Maxwell had summoned John Pole, his head of security. A former detective chief superintendent employed for thirty years at Scotland Yard, where he had earned sixteen commendations, Pole had become accustomed, like all Maxwell’s staff, to responding unquestioningly to the summons day and night, regardless of the inconvenience. ‘We need to talk,’ growled Maxwell as he replaced the telephone receiver. Minutes later Pole was sitting erect and attentive opposite his employer, ‘I’m concerned about Andrea Martin’s loyalty,’ sighed Maxwell. Pole had noticed the millionaire’s infatuation with the young woman. ‘She knows a lot of confidential information and I fear she’s having an affair with Nick Davies. She has promised me that it’s over, but I don’t trust him and she might be telling him more than is healthy.’

Davies was the snappy foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, a journalist generally disliked by his colleagues, who had given him the sobriquet ‘Sneaky’. Maxwell suspected Davies’s loyalty, but was uncharacteristically unsure how best to neutralize an employee who had invaded the heart of his private territory. He then uttered the phrase which preceded his most intimate instructions to Pole: ‘I need to know if this person is being loyal to me.’ It was Maxwell’s euphemism for instructing that he wanted Andrea Martin’s telephone tapped.

Maxwell had long enjoyed the use of listening devices or bugs. His black briefcase contained a concealed tape recorder operated by a turn of the lock, and a bug had been inserted into a table lamp in his home. During the 1984 negotiations with the Mirror Group’s trade unions, he had used crude tape recorders to monitor his adversaries’ negotiating position. In later years, another former police officer in his employ was regularly to bring him cassettes of taped telephone conversations among his own executives. Sitting in his apartment at the end of the day, the congenital eavesdropper would race through the tapes listening for clues to disloyalty, weaknesses or hidden mistakes. In an atmosphere reminiscent of Stalin’s Kremlin, Pole had supervised in 1988 the concealment of two microphones in Maxwell’s own office – activated by a switch under his desk – and one in the conference room in the Mirror building. A microphone was also secreted in Kevin’s office in Maxwell House. This followed the disappearance of the banker’s draft worth £4.7 million (see p. 10), Telephone taps on the suspect revealed nothing. The draft had never been cashed.

Maxwell’s ruse was to invite guests to remain in Kevin’s room or the conference room while he excused himself briefly to tend another chore. Lumbering along to his own office, he would unlock the cupboard behind his desk and activate the recording machines, which Pole had rendered foolproof to accommodate his ‘banana fingers’. Having eavesdropped on the conversations to glean his competitors’ secrets, he would return at the appropriate moment to exploit his advantage. The subterfuge had won him undeserved acclaim as an outstanding negotiator, Pole’s tap on Andrea Martin’s telephone produced different results.

At the end of the week, Pole returned with a tape: ‘You’d better listen to this, Mr Maxwell.’ For twenty minutes Maxwell sat motionless as the recognizable voices of Andrea and Davies giggled over their previous night’s romps in a car. When Davies mentioned details of Andrea’s underwear, Maxwell flinched. Pole noticed his hurt: ‘Heartbroken, even shattered.’ The woman with whom he was in love had lied. Despite her promise that her affair with Davies had ceased, it was in full flow. Emotionally, Maxwell was vulnerable. Estranged from his family, he had lost the one person upon whom he felt he could rely. He had paid for her loyalty with an annual contract worth £36,000, a considerable sum for a secretary, but after that betrayal there was no alternative but her dismissal, which followed in July 1990, Douglas Harrod noticed the result. ‘Maxwell went down in the dumps. He was a very unhappy man.’

Ever since, there had been no one with whom Maxwell could relax at the end of the day. Besides that emotional deprivation, he was also losing control of his private office. Having failed to replace Peter Jay, his self-styled chief of staff in the years 1986–9, he no longer employed anyone as competent to arrange his papers and organize his diary. As his moods and sympathies oscillated violently, secretaries and personal assistants in his private office changed with damaging regularity. Gradually, despite his roared demands for efficiency, his private office was becoming chaotic.

By contrast, the management of his tenth-floor penthouse was immaculate. Normally waking at 6.30 after fitful sleep, Maxwell would find his staff ready to fulfil his every whim, especially the most unreasonable. Deprived of his family’s company and support, he had thrown himself into a routine which had moved from hectic into frenetic. Increasingly cancelling invitations at the last moment, he would collapse into bed in the early evening to be served dinner while channel-hopping on television or watching a video.

Martin Cheeseman, his chef, had been recommended four years before by Harrod. ‘He’s worked in Downing Street,’ boasted the butler. ‘But can he cook?’ retorted Maxwell. He had proved to be a devoted servant. ‘I knew my customer and gave him what he wanted,’ explained Cheeseman, a thirty-seven-year-old south-east Londoner who served ‘mostly salmon, roast chicken and avocados’. Sufficient food was always prepared for Maxwell’s night-time feasts, especially melons filled with berries and cornflakes. Improbably Cheeseman insisted, ‘I only fed him healthy food. He didn’t pig out. He was that shape when I arrived.’ Their relationship flourished because Maxwell tended to treat his servants like directors and his directors like servants. He had warmed to the young man’s unassuming conversation, inviting him to accompany him on longer journeys so that he could avoid eating unwelcome dishes.

Alongside Cheeseman were Juliet and Elsa, the Filipina maids. Their predecessor had been fired after accusations of stealing television sets, clothes, food and cases of wine. In any event, Maxwell had not prosecuted. But the maids were obliged to tolerate an unfortunate development in his personal habits: his obesity had spawned filthiness. Not only were his soiled clothes and half-eaten food thrown on the floors, but the lavatory after use was abandoned unflushed and the bed linen was occasionally oddly coloured. ‘We’re short of face towels,’ Terry Gilmour, a chief steward, once told the Publisher’s wife Betty. Puzzled, she reminded him that twenty-four Valentino flannels had been delivered just weeks earlier. ‘Mr Maxwell’s using them instead of toilet paper,’ explained Gilmour expressionlessly, ‘and discards them on the floor.’ To save the staff the indignity, Betty Maxwell arranged for the towels to be brought in sealed plastic bags to the family home in Oxford, for washing. All these members of Maxwell’s personal staff shared one quality: their ignorance of his business activities. Although his bedroom was occasionally turned into an office with documents piled beneath a computer screen, none of those in such close proximity would have understood his orders to move money and shares.

Similar ignorance infected Sir John Quinton, chairman of Barclays Bank, who lunched with Maxwell on 7 November, the day after the Berlitz share certificates had been hidden in the safe. Britain’s biggest bank had lent Maxwell’s private companies over £200 million, and Quinton, who deluded himself that he could understand London’s more maverick entrepreneurs, was easily persuaded by his host of the health of MCC’s finances. As Quinton drove back into the City after lunch, the Publisher climbed the metal staircase to the roof of Maxwell House, walked across the astroturf and boarded his helicopter for Farnborough airport.

An unmistakable sense of relief always passed through Maxwell’s mass as Captain Dick Cowley, his pilot since 1986, pulled the joystick and the Aérospatiale 355 rose above London, passing directly over the glinting scales of justice on the dome of the Old Bailey. Cowley enjoyed being used by Maxwell as a £250 per hour taxi and would laugh about the gigantic insurance premium paid to cover landing the helicopter on the roof. Maxwell always refused to travel to the airport by car. If the weather was bad, he preferred to wait, meanwhile keeping his aircrew waiting on the tarmac for his arrival. Cowley savoured memories of flying Maxwell through snowstorms to Oxford, peering into the white gloom for recognizable landmarks, and the enjoyment of intimate conversations during those flights. He even tolerated midnight calls, hearing his employer’s lament about Andrea’s departure. Cowley was respected because he was employed to perform one task which Maxwell could not undertake: ‘I stayed and put up with all his nonsense because he paid me well.’

The flight from Holborn to Farnborough lasted fifteen minutes. As they flew that November afternoon, Maxwell could reflect on his growing disenchantment with the technicalities of finance. The excitement had long disappeared; indeed, in recent months his usual exhausting long hours running the empire had become positively unpleasant. Those financial chores he was pleased to delegate to Kevin, who, despite their past quarrels and the estrangement when Kevin decided to marry Pandora Warnford-Davis, he could now trust more than any other person. Father and son were working jointly to overcome their temporary difficulties. As the helicopter whirred down to the airport the strain of the past days was dissolving. Kevin could look after the business problems while his father embarked upon what he enjoyed most – powerbroking among the world’s leaders.

No sooner had he been deposited alongside his new $24 million Gulfstream 4 executive jet, codenamed VR-BOB (Very Rich Bob), than Maxwell was bustling up the steps shedding the last of his tribulations. Captain Brian Hull, the pilot, welcomed his passenger, aware that ‘he always became happy after he boarded. He saw me as home.’ Minutes later, they were flying at 500 m.p.h. towards Israel, a three-and-a-half-hour journey costing £14,000 in each direction.