A son of the disgraced tycoon Robert Maxwell bears "heavy responsibility" for the collapse of his late father's empire, a British government report said yesterday. So, too, does US investment banking giant, Goldman Sachs.
Nine years in the making, the inquiry confirmed that Mr Maxwell snr plundered the pension funds of his employees, leaving hidden debts of more than £400 million and robbing hundreds of workers of their nest eggs.
Mr Maxwell, famous for his girth and bullying nature, also manipulated the share price of his floated companies by buying and selling shares secretly.
"The primary responsibility rests with Mr Robert Maxwell," a High Court judge, Sir John Thomas, and an accountant, Mr Raymond Turner, said in the report, published by the Department of Trade and Industry. "In addition Mr Kevin Maxwell bears a heavy responsibility in respect of many of the events."
Mr Maxwell died at sea after falling from his yacht off the Canary Islands in 1991, causing one of the biggest corporate collapses in British history. His sons, Kevin and Ian, were acquitted of fraud charges at a criminal trial in 1996.
Kevin said in a statement yesterday he accepted his share of responsibility for the "corporate disaster".
The report concluded that Goldman Sachs bore "a substantial responsibility in respect of the manipulation that occurred in the market".
Mr Maxwell's practices in the pension funds were also known to the accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte, the inquiry said. But he kept his financial advisers in the dark. Mr Maxwell was one of Britain's most powerful tycoons who built a media empire and bullied all around him. Mystery still shrouds the circumstances of his death.
Born Jan Lodvik Hoch, he was the son of Jewish peasants from one of Czechoslovakia's poorest provinces. He escaped the Holocaust which claimed his relatives and emerged from the second World War with a British army medal for gallantry.