seth #FBPE

Robert Maxwell took £460 million from his own workers' pension funds, then vanished off his yacht in November 1991. His sons were left to answer for it. His son Kevin was 32. A year later he owed £406.5 million, the biggest personal bankruptcy in UK history. In the video below, weeks after his death, both sons sit in front of MPs and refuse to answer a single question about the missing pension money. One MP said it "might be a question as simple as: do you know where the money is?" Asked which pension trust funds he belonged to, Ian said: "I decline to answer." Kevin's lawyer told the committee they would not answer "however many questions this committee poses this afternoon." Maxwell owned the Daily Mirror and a publishing empire. Kevin chaired Maxwell Communications and Macmillan. His brother Ian worked alongside him. On 5 November 1991 Maxwell went missing from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, named after his youngest daughter. His body was found floating in the Atlantic off the Canary Islands. The inquest said heart attack and accidental drowning. Within weeks the hole showed up. £460 million was missing from the Mirror Group pension funds, money that belonged to thousands of employees. Kevin's last conversation with his father was what he later called a "massive shouting match" over a meeting with the deputy governor of the Bank of England. Both sons were bankrupt by 1992. At 32, Kevin's £406.5 million of debt worked out to about £12.7 million for every year he'd been alive. The pensioners didn't get their money back in full. After a partial government bailout, most had to accept about a 50% cut in the value of their pensions. Kevin and Ian were tried for fraud. In 1996 a jury acquitted them both. Their side is that they expected to be charged, so their lawyers told them to stay silent until a jury heard it. Kevin's lawyer said he "denies any criminal dishonesty whatsoever." The jury agreed. Ian later said of his father: "The embrace was suffocating and so loving." I think the silence says more than the acquittal. Weeks after £460 million vanished, the two men running the business wouldn't even say which pension funds they belonged to. A father took his workers' retirement money, and his son Kevin was left holding £406.5 million of debt. Were Kevin and Ian Maxwell victims of their father's fraud, or did they know exactly what was happening in the family business?