Socialist billionaire sets sights on media empire spanning the world

Press, 6 January 1987, Page 16

Socialist billionaire sets sights on media empire spanning the world

By

MAUREEN JOHNSON,

of

Associated Press, in London

Mr Robert Maxwell, Britain’s socialist tycoon, is reaching out with a series of take-overs in a multibillion-dollar dash to create a global communications empire. What drives the bulky, Czechborn millionaire is a conviction that within a decade, the communications and information industry will, like the oil industry now, be dominated by ten or 12 giants. Mr Maxwell is determined to be among those giants — an international mogul with his socialist beliefs- intact. “Just because I’ve made a dime or two, it doesn’t invalidate that (socialism),” he said. Such flamboyance is a keynote of the man bom Labji Hoch, the son of Jewish peasant parents who died at the hands of the Nazis.

He arrived in Britain as a penniless teenager in 1940 and became a hero in World War. 11, winning the Military Cross and a commission in the British Army. Mr Maxwell served as a Labour Party member of Parliament for six years, made and lost fortunes and always bounced back. He has a reputation as a tough, hands-on executive. He learned English in six weeks, speaks seven other languages, and is an ebullient epitome of the selfeducated, self-made man. He doesn’t belong to a club, own racehorses, or play golf. He just 1 works ever harder, living with his French-born wife in a rented mansion, Headington Hall, near Oxford. They have seven children, some of whom run Maxwell companies. His activities include owning the Oxford United soccer team, taking over the finances of the ailing Commonwealth Games last summer, starting an Ethiopian famine relief fund, and maintaining close contacts with East Bloc embassies.

Since the shrewd purchase of a printing conglomerate in 1981, Mr Maxwell’s Permagon group of printing, engineering, and publishing companies is now estim-

ated to be worth about SNZ2.BI billion and employs about 25,000 people.

But the extravagantly patriotic Mr Maxwell still is regularly dubbed the "bouncing Czech” by commentators and is accused of being obsessed with self-public-ity. The lack of acceptance doesn’t, seem to bother him.

“It’s water off a duck’s back,” said Mr Maxwell, whose booming baritone has an upper-class English accent. “I have no inferiority complex about being accepted ... It’s for the natives to get adjusted to me, and that occasionally upsets them and that’s why I’m not always popular.” Mr Maxwell, interviewed recently in his magnificent offices at his Mirror Group newspapers near Fleet Street, added: “I’ve been called a self-publicist for so long, it doesn’t matter.” Beneath the jibes runs the suggestion that it is terribly pushy and un-British of Maxwell, for example, to have the “Daily Mirror” carry front-page pictures of himself presenting a bingo prize to a reader or meeting royalty. Mr Maxwell’s business career began in 1951 when he bought Permagon Press, a small publisher of scientific journals, for $NZ36,500. In 1981 came the massive break when he bought the failing British Printing and Communication Corporation, the country’s biggest printing firm. Its 1985 profits were 5NZ71.65 million and may treble this year. Mr Maxwell bought Mirror Group Newspapers in 1984 for $NZ172.8 million and fulfilled an ambition to own a national newspaper. As well as the “Daily Mirror,” the deal included two national weeklies and two big Scottish newspapers. The Left-wing "Mirror” is Britain’s second-biggest news-, paper, with three million copies daily, and is locked in a circulation battle with Mr Rupert Murdoch’s conservative “Sun,” which sells four million copies a day.

In the last few months, Maxwell’s take-overs have included two American companies: Webb Co. for SNZ22S million cash, and Providence Gravure, a printer of consumer magazines and medical' catalogues, for SNZ292 million. He hopes for more American acquisitions in 1987, which could see him going head-to-head across the Atlantic with Mr Murdoch, his major rival newspaper publisher in Britain. “We’ve spent about a quarter of a billion dollars sp far and we will be spending anything between two and three billion more during the course of the next year, subject to finding the right businesses at the right price,” said Mr Maxwell, who is 63. “B.P.C.C. has got SUSI billion

(SNZI.92 billion) in shareholders’ funds, SUS4OO million (SNZ76BM) in cash — and virtually no debt,” said Mr Maxwell. While orchestrating take-overs in recent months, Mr Maxwell turned a libel-suit victory over the satirical magazine “Private Eye” into a flamboyant crusade against the oft-sued bi-weekly.

Mr Maxwell had been attacked regularly in “Private Eye” before he sued the 250,000-circula-tion magazine over its story alleging he paid for foreign trips for the leader of the Labour Party, Mr Neil Kinnock, and thus hoped to get a peerage. It is illegal to pay bribes for honours, for which the Prime Minister and Opposition leader make nominations.

The case culminated in

November in the most costly judgment yet against “Private Eye” — SNZISO.OOO in damages and about $NZ560,000 in legal costs.

‘.‘Private Eye” continues with cruel caricatures of Mr Maxwell, but he has responded by rushing out one million copies of a spoof, “Not Private Eye,” and a hardback account of the court hearing, “Malice in Wonderland.”

“Malice in Wonderland” was not without fresh ammunition for Mr .Maxwell’s critics. It included a replica of his honorary doctorate from the Polytechnic Institute of New York, a thank-you letter from the, Queen after a press-centre tour, and a Max-well-with-Prince' Charles picture from the “Daily Mirror.”