Business Activities
Maxwell established the Maxwell Foundation in Liechtenstein in 1970. After briefly losing control of Pergamon Press Ltd (PPL) in the early 1970s (see Controversy below), in 1974 he reacquired the company. Maxwell acquired the British Printing Corporation (BPC) in 1981, and changed its name to the British Printing and Communication Corporation (BPCC) and then to the Maxwell Communications Corporation. The company was later sold in a management buy-out, and is now known as Polestar. In July 1984 Maxwell acquired Mirror Group Newspapers from Reed International plc. MGN published the Daily Mirror, a pro-Labour Party tabloid newspaper. He also bought the American interests of the Macmillan publishing house.
By the 1980s Maxwell's various companies owned the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail and several other newspapers, Pergamon Press, Nimbus Records, Collier books, Maxwell Directories, Prentice Hall Information Services, Macmillan (US) publishing, and the Berlitz language schools. He also owned a half-share of MTV in Europe and other European television interests, Maxwell Cable TV and Maxwell Entertainment. In 1987 Maxwell purchased part of IPC Media to create Fleetway Publications.
In June 1985, Maxwell announced a takeover of Sir Clive Sinclair's ailing home computer company, Sinclair Research, through Hollis Brothers, a Pergamon Press subsidiary. However the deal was aborted in August 1985.
Maxwell's links with Eastern European totalitarian regimes resulted in a number of biographies (generally considered to be hagiographies) of those countries' then leaders, with interviews conducted by Maxwell, for which he received much derision.
Maxwell was also well known as the chairman of Oxford United Football Club, saving them from bankruptcy and leading them into the top flight of English football, winning the League Cup in 1986. Maxwell bought into Derby County F.C. in 1987. He also attempted to buy Manchester United in 1984, but refused owner Martin Edwards' asking price.
Read more about this topic: Robert Maxwell
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“As for your friend, my prospective reader, I hope he ignores Fort Sumter, and “Old Abe,” and all that; for that is just the most fatal, and, indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil ever; for, as long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis. What business have you, if you are an “angel of light,” to be pondering over the deeds of darkness, reading the New York Herald, and the like.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)