In the event, the pension fund shares were exchanged with Lehmans for Treasury bills which were then cashed. The money was paid not to the pension funds but to LBI and then to Headington Hill Investments, Maxwell’s private company. The bankers’ apparent lack of concern that Maxwell might have been using pension fund shares to raise cash was reflected in their confused records. Haas was dealing with LBI, Maxwell’s private investment company, which allegedly was representing BIM, the pension fund managers. Yet in Lehmans’ records the depositor of the shares was recorded as ‘LBIIM’, a different entity, suggesting unusual carelessness by the bank.
Trevor Cook, meanwhile, was not only ignorant of the deal negotiated by Trachtenberg and Kevin with Lehmans, but when on 16 October Daily arrived at a Maxwell office in Shoe Lane to meet him and Trachtenberg, he remained unaware of the Invesco trader’s conversation with Haas. Daily had invited himself to present his expertise in stock lending. Towards the end of the meeting, Trachtenberg explained to Daily that LBI was paying 1.75 per cent for stock-lending fees. Although Daily realized that the figure was higher than normal, he said nothing. Cook also stayed silent: he knew that LBI’s fees might be high but he ‘had no point of reference’. Any doubts were offset by Donoughue’s presence within LBI. ‘I trusted Donoughue and he knew that we were stock lending the pension fund assets. I assumed it was all right,’ recalled Cook.
‘That was a load of rubbish,’ Daily said to his colleagues as they descended in the lift.
‘Don’t say anything here,’ replied one of the other occupants. ‘The lift’s probably bugged.’
Cramped into a small office on their return, Daily told his superiors, ‘It’s all wrong.’ The response was equivocal. To refuse to comply with their client’s request was out of the question, not least because Maxwell was a shareholder and a friend of Lord Stevens. So, on 19 October, after several telephone calls asking, ‘Is it all ready?’, Trachtenberg arrived in Invesco’s entrance hall and personally took the share certificates from Daily, signing a receipt. On one issue Trachtenberg was insistent: the transfer was temporary. The certificates were to be returned in thirty days.
To regularize the arrangement, Kevin and Robert Maxwell signed a contract. Kevin (on behalf of BIM) and his father (on behalf of the Robert Maxwell Group) agreed that RMG could borrow BIM’s stock. Although dated 1 October 1990, it appears to have been formulated at the end of 1990 to cover the Capel Cure and Invesco transactions. It allowed both Kevin and Trachtenberg to reinforce the claim they were making to Cook that pension fund assets were involved in stock lending. But Cook, although he was BIM’s manager, was not suspicious. After he had received a letter from Lehmans stating that the shares and Treasury bills ‘were held for your account’, he assumed that the pension funds were covered by genuine collateral of between 125 and 150 per cent. But he never actually saw any share certificates, nor did he ask to see anything. ‘I just got lists and letters,’ Cook later reflected ruefully, ‘from Trachtenberg on behalf of LBI.’ Everything, he believed, was held by the banks. He did not ask to see the Treasury bills nor did he realize that they had been cashed. ‘I should have checked the share certificates but I didn’t suspect anything. I was fooled.’
The deception was intentional. On returning to his office after meeting Daily, Trachtenberg had sent a revealing memo to Kevin about their arrangement: ‘I assured them [Tim Daily and colleagues] that LBI’s involvement was in a strictly advisory capacity, and that our [LBI’s] involvement in no way involved LBI utilizing stock in security transactions on its own behalf.’ The problem, he realized, was how to orchestrate ‘a clean transfer’ of the pension funds’ shares from BIM to the banks, concealing their true ownership. Kevin’s reply was not preserved.
At the end of this period of frantic activity, Kevin agreed over the weekend of 3 November to play poker with some friends in the City and host a firework party at Hailey, his home near Wallingford. It was a brief interlude before he secured the £50 million loan from Julie Maitland at Crédit Suisse and obtained the Berlitz share certificates.
THREE Hunting for Cash – 19 November 1990
On Monday, 19 November, Kevin flew to New York on the evening Concorde. As usual he stayed at the Carlyle, the choice of many international tycoons as Manhattan’s most discreet yet sumptuous hotel. After shuttling between seventeen meetings with Macmillan executives and bankers the following day, he slept overnight on a British Airways Jumbo back to London. He had every reason to feel satisfied. Everyone he had met had appeared reassured by his self-confident manner, his deep-voiced, decisive tone and his air of efficiency. None would have guessed that the polite, well-dressed Englishman was concealing near-bankruptcy. Punctually at 6.30 a.m. the Jumbo glided on to Heathrow’s runway, and Kevin separated himself from his fellow passengers to be whisked through the special customs facilities, before being helicoptered by Captain Cowley to Maxwell House in Holborn to begin the day meeting Larry Trachtenberg. The pace was unremitting.
Robert Maxwell was at that moment flying to Los Angeles. Since 12 November, the Chairman had been travelling across America in what he called a roadshow to launch the Central and Eastern European Fund, a banking venture concocted with Merrill Lynch to entice financial institutions into investing $250 million on the basis of his expertise in the former communist countries. To Maxwell, short of money yet eager to exert the influence of a billionaire, the Fund was a last effort to grasp large amounts of other people’s money to be used for his own benefit. Over several days, he met bankers, pension fund managers and corporation presidents in an attempt to persuade them to earmark funds. For those like Katherine Pelley, one of the banking aides in his retinue, the roadshow was becoming a harassing adventure. Regularly late to meetings and delivering lacklustre speeches, Maxwell was proving to be a ‘nightmare’, a liability rather than an asset to his own ambitions. The burden of his deception was sapping his self-confident assertions of his financial prowess. Dispirited, he returned to London for an MCC board meeting, which was to be held at 5 p.m. on 23 November.
Regardless of his perceived troubles and bad press, Robert Maxwell believed that he could still count upon the support and sympathy of the six non-family directors who, though acknowledging that he was a difficult man, believed in his genius. Besides the executive directors Jean-Pierre Anselmini, Ron Woods, Richard Baker and Basil Brookes, the young acting finance director recruited from Coopers in 1986, there were two older non-executive directors: Lord Rippon, the former Conservative minister who had negotiated Britain’s entry into the European Union, and Peter Laister, a former managing director of Thorn EMI with a fair reputation in the City.
For all of them, the DTI inspectors’ damning judgment in 1971 that Maxwell could not be ‘relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company’ was ‘history’. All of them had witnessed the ‘City process’ and tended to feel contempt, even ‘disgust’, for the slickers’ ‘behaviour around the carcass’. Maxwell impressed them on several levels: as a polyglot at the centre of an extraordinary network of relations with world leaders; as a newspaper tycoon who had broken the trade unions; and as a superman able to revive dying companies. Accordingly they were prepared to allow the Chairman near-dictatorial powers.
Of course, these men were well rewarded, especially Rippon. As chairman of Brassey’s, the military publishers owned by Maxwell, he was paid $100,000 per annum, and he drew generous expenses. On one occasion, Maxwell simply wrote a cheque for £10,000 at his request. For his part, Maxwell admired Rippon’s transformation of Invesco MIM, but it was Rippon’s bank, the Robert Fraser Group, which gave him the greatest help. Through Robert Fraser, Maxwell had pumped into MCC and Pergamon Holdings some of the money taken from the pension funds, and had completed three property deals to pump profits into MCC which later investigation would reveal to be dubious. In 1989, no less than 33 per cent of MCC’s profits were ‘one-off’ transactions with Robert Fraser recorded just before the announcement of the interim profits. In 1990, 43 Per cent of the Group profits were one-offs with companies incorporated in Liechtenstein and the Isle of Man or with BIM and Robert Fraser. But although he could count upon Lord Rippon, Maxwell knew that there were tensions with the other directors. Anselmini, the proud French