ROBERT MAXWELL
The Maxwell Years: 1984-91
In July 1984, Maxwell acquired Mirror Group Newspapers, the publisher of six British newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, from Reed International plc.[29] for £113 million.[30] This led to the famous media war between Maxwell and Murdoch, the proprietor of the News of the World and The Sun.
Reed had no more luck with the printing unions than had IPC, and one by one the pieces of its publishing empire were sold off during the 1970s, starting with the magazines. Last to go were the Mirror newspapers, which then as now consisted of the Daily Mirror, Daily Record, Sunday Mirror, The People (a glossy Sunday spread), the Sunday Mail, the Sporting Life, and the Sporting Life Weekender. Reed could find no buyer for the Mirror newspapers, however, and a plan to float the group on the public exchange was ruined when Price Waterhouse discovered gross union laxities and described them in its prospectus statement. At the last minute an unlikely white knight appeared in the form of Robert Maxwell, Czech-born business dealer extraordinaire, who purchased the Mirror papers for about £90 million in 1984.
Mirror Group Newspapers Ltd. (MGN) became a pillar of Robert Maxwell's incredibly tangled business empire, a mysterious world in which the distinction between private and public companies was regularly ignored by Maxwell and his sons Ian and Kevin. A former MP for the Labour Party and a professed friend of the working man, Maxwell, according to many critics, had little regard for anything beyond his own insatiable desire for fame, and he had long coveted a public platform such as MGN offered. He took over MGN editorial policy while denying that he would even be interested in doing so, and by threat of company closure persuaded the unions to cut their employee levels and relinquish a host of archaic union rules.
For the same reason, Maxwell did not hesitate to break the law when his financial network began unraveling in the late 1980s. His 1988 purchase of Macmillan, Inc., the American publisher, and Official Airline Guides, Inc., for which he borrowed a combined $3.35 billion, pushed his empire further into precarious territory. The anemic economy in 1989 sent the price of stock at Maxwell Communications Corporation (MCC) spiraling downward. MCC was the holding company for Maxwell's American interests and the collateral for many of the huge loans made to Maxwell's private holding companies at the top of the pyramid. To bolster MCC's falling share price, Maxwell engaged in a blur of desperate transactions, including the use of Mirror Group pension funds and other cash accounts to buy MCC shares and provide collateral for further new loans. Shortly after the first signs of imminent personal bankruptcy appeared in November 1991, Maxwell's body was found floating off the stern of his yacht, at which point his conglomerate fell to pieces in a welter of bankruptcy filings and criminal investigations.
Of all of Maxwell's holdings, MGN was probably the soundest at the time of his death, but the company sustained serious losses due to Maxwell's illegal business dealings. In its 1992 annual report MGN noted a one-time extraordinary loss of £421 million to cover the cost of repairs, but the company also showed a healthy operating profit of £91 million on revenues of £460 million.
Read more: https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/52/Trinity-Mirror-plc.html#ixzz6RU2JU0e2
After six years as a Labour MP during the 1960s, Maxwell again put all his energy into business, successively buying the British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers and Macmillan Publishers, among other publishing companies.
Mirror Group Newspapers (formerly Trinity Mirror, now part of Reach plc)
Reach plc's printing division, Reach Printing Services,[34] is located at nine press sites throughout the UK, printing and distributing thirty-six major newspapers for the UK, including the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, the Sunday People, the Daily Record (in Scotland), and other contract titles including titles for the Guardian Media Group.[35] Reach plc also owns a number of local titles in Northern England and in Surrey and Berkshire, after acquiring a number of titles from the Guardian Media Group in 2010.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reach_plc
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