Robert Maxwell, father of the former girlfriend and “pimp” of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, employed the late tycoon to hide the hundreds of stolen millions, claims a new documentary.
House of Maxwell, a BBC series airing 4 April, promises to shed light on the mystery of the missing £800 million from the firms owned by the media magnate, whose naked body was found in 1991 under suspicious circumstances.
Maxwell had risen from obscurity to build an extensive publishing empire. The man who had led a flamboyant lifestyle, often sailing his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, died at the age of 68 after purportedly falling from his vessel near the Canary Islands.
Just a day before his death, Robert Maxwell purportedly spoke on the phone with his son Kevin regarding a meeting scheduled with the Bank of England. Maxwell had £50,000,000 in loans with the bank, according to the outlet, but he ostensibly skipped the meeting and set out on his yacht.
In this July 2, 2020 file photo, Audrey Strauss, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks during a news conference in New York, to announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her alleged role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein
© AP Photo / John Minchillo
After his death, huge discrepancies in his companies' finances were revealed, including fraudulent misappropriation of £460 million from the Mirror Group pension fund.
The publishing empire began to collapse as banks started calling in loans. While Maxwell’s sons made a vain attempt to keep the business afloat, news of the stolen millions forced them to apply for bankruptcy in 1992.
Eventually, £800 million was found missing from Maxwell's firm. It has since been claimed that Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a Manhattan prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, helped mask the fraud.
‘Parking Money Offshore’
House of Maxwell, cited by the Daily Mail, claims its revelations may also explain another intriguing mystery - how Epstein made his fortune, while also suggesting that the convicted sex offender met his former lover and associate, Ghislaine, through her father.
It has been claimed that Epstein and “sophisticated predator” Maxwell, convicted in a New York courtroom on 29 December of recruiting and grooming underage girls for sexual encounters with the disgraced financier between 1994 and 2004, met after her father's death.
A former friend of Ghislaine Maxwell, Vassi Chamberlain, is cited as saying in the programme:
“I was in the City and I had some friends who worked on Wall Street during that time and they heard that Jeffrey Epstein and Robert Maxwell had entered into an agreement before Robert Maxwell's death, whereby certain funds had been siphoned off. That is what Jeffrey Epstein was doing at the time, he was helping very rich people park their money offshore, to avoid tax.”
According to Colin Barr, the executive producer of the series, it can now be accepted as a fact that Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein knew one another before Robert Maxwell died.
Jeffrey Epstein reportedly funded Ghislaine's lavish lifestyle in a tit-for-tat exchange, whereby Maxwell used her social contacts to introduce gardener's son Epstein to society.
In return, the financier is said to have paid for her new home in Manhattan, while also funnelling £22 million ($30.7 million ) to her over a period of eight years, it was claimed during her trial.
While at the time of her arrest in 2020 the woman who acted as Epstein’s “pimp” claimed to be worth £2.6 million, cited forensic accountants estimate Maxwell had a net worth of £15million ($20.2 million) in 2015.
The 60-year-old 'favourite' daughter of the disgraced media mogul had acquired and sold mansions worth £16 million since 2015, with financier Epstein purportedly wiring £22 million to her, according to the outlet.
She also reportedly transferred £15 million to her husband, Scott Borgerson, after they had clandestinely tied the knot, so as to protect her wealth from being claimed by victims.
Transactions between Epstein, Maxwell and offshore funds, as well as buying and selling homes using private companies, were all ostensibly part of a concocted scheme to render it impossible for the FBI to gauge the true extent of now convicted Ghislaine Maxwell’s cash and assets.
Maxwell had insisted she had been forced to sell off to a property developer her London residence, where Prince Andrew’s sex abuse accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, then 17, was photographed with the royal. She had claimed she had been forced by Epstein to engage in intimate relations with the royal. The Duke of York has always denied the claims, or any accusations of wrongdoing, and has since settled with the woman in an out-of-court deal.
Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and Ghislaine Maxwell. This photo was included in an affidavit in which Giuffre alleged that she was directed to have sex with Andrew
© Photo : Florida Southern District Court
Five years ago, Ghislaine Maxwell sold her US home in New York’s Upper East Side for £11.3million, acquiring a mansion worth £2 million with her husband Scott Borgerson in the resort of Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts, that same year.
In 2019 Ghislaine Maxwell, according to the Daily Beast, made her last acquisition - the New Hampshire ranch called ‘Tuckedaway', possibly using an alias. It was there she was arrested by the FBI.