Poirot tries to solve Maxwell mystery
Award-winning actor David Suchet stars as the controversial media mogul Robert Maxwell in a TV drama soon to be shown on BBC-2.
Called simply ‘Maxwell’, it tells the story of the bizarre events leading up to the publishing tycoon’s mysterious drowning off the coast of Tenerife in 1991.
Suchet, best known for his TV and film portrayals of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, has spent many hours researching the complicated character of the newspaper baron.
Robert Maxwell disappeared overboard from his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, in the early hours of November 5.
His body was found in the sea after a huge search operation involving two helicopters, rescue launches and a dozen other ships.
Nearly 16 years later we are no nearer knowing what happened at sea that fateful night – did he jump, did he fall or was he murdered?
There have been many claims, the most intriguing of which was that Maxwell was an agent for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and was murdered because he tried to blackmail them into financing his ailing newspaper empire.
It has been alleged by a former Mossad agent that Maxwell was lured to a meeting at the luxury Hotel Mency in the Tenerife capital of Santa Cruz just a few hours before his death.
There a message was passed to him demanding a rendezvous at sea on the other side of the island.
Quite how a Mossad hit squad then managed to board the yacht in the middle of the night as it scooted along at 15 knots, eliminate their target and disappear into the darkness without any of the crew raising the alarm has never been indicated.
After Maxwell’s death it emerged that he had embezzled £440m from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers and that the company’s debts hugely outweighed its assets.
In 1996, after an eight-month trial, his sons Kevin and Ian Maxwell and another man, Larry Trachtenberg, were cleared of conspiracy to defraud Mirror Group pensioners.
In 2001 the Department of Trade and Industry released a report into the Maxwell affair which said ‘primary responsibility’ for the collapse of the Maxwell business empire lay with its founder.
But it added that Kevin Maxwell and some leading City financial institutions also bore a ‘heavy responsibility’ for the company’s failure.
Some 30,000 Mirror Group pensioners fought a three-year campaign for compensation and eventually received a £100m government payout and a £276m out-of-court settlement with City institutions and the remnants of Robert Maxwell’s media group.
