Maxwell: The Final Verdict. Tom Bower
securities lending department. To conceal the scheme, the contract signed by Kevin on BIM’s behalf was made complicated. Lehmans would be given shares from BIM’s portfolio, and in exchange would give Treasury bills to Maxwell. Maxwell would immediately sell the bills back to Lehmans, who would pay him in cash. The end result would be that Maxwell had cash and Lehmans had the security of the pension fund shares. In theory, the pension funds would retrieve their shares after buying back the Treasury bills. In the meantime, the impression was preserved that the pension funds still owned the shares unencumbered.
There was one major obstacle to overcome to obtain that cash. On each share certificate, the owner was registered as BIM. To use those pension fund shares, Maxwell needed to invent a cover story to explain his entry into such an unusual transaction.
The reason provided by Trachtenberg to Di Rocco was that BIM needed cash so that it could reinvest the money in shares which would produce higher returns than its existing portfolio, while simultaneously retaining the investment benefit of the shares it pledged. To Maxwell’s delight, Di Rocco accepted the business. Whether the banker realized by specific inquiries that BIM was the manager of pension fund assets would remain uncertain and be subsequently contested. But he and his superiors did realize that the arrangement was ‘purely a funding exercise’, and their suspicions ought to have been aroused because the circumstances were so unusual. It was unusual in two ways: first, the bank was to pay the cash into Maxwell’s private accounts; and second, neither Trachtenberg nor Andrew Smith was a director of BIM. Indeed, Trachtenberg said he represented LBIIM, which was acting as BIM’s agent.
There was one final hurdle. Before the pension fund shares could be used for stock lending, Trachtenberg required Trevor Cook’s consent. At the end of October 1989, after reading LBI’s terms for stock lending, Cook, BIM’s manager, signed an agreement. But that agreement – between BIM and LBI – was different from the contract with Lehmans signed by Kevin on LBI’s behalf, which was not for stock lending but for a loan.
To Cook, everything appeared normal. Working in an open-plan office in Dorrington Street with files marked ‘Stock lending accounts’, he and his deputy Jeff Highfield received monthly accounts from LBI recording the value of the stock lending: Cook in turn would bill LBI for the agreed 1.75 per cent fee. Cook’s willingness to be helpful made the Maxwells’ task much easier. He never asked to see the contracts.
Throughout 1989, with Cook’s agreement, Maxwell had also been personally borrowing increasing amounts of money from BIM, rising from £5 million to £22.5 million. To extinguish the debt, Maxwell ‘sold’ to BIM privately owned shares, but publicly he did not reveal the change of ownership. ‘We’ll always give the pension funds first refusal to earn profits from our share deals,’ Maxwell had told Cook. To the manager, the offer appeared generous. Apparently he remained unsuspicious even when Maxwell’s £22.5 million borrowing during 1989 cost the pension funds £510,000.
Having established Cook’s willingness to accept directives, Maxwell summoned him in January 1990. ‘I have decided it would be in BIM’s interest to buy more MCC shares,’ he said. ‘The price is certain to rise.’ Cook agreed, without questioning Maxwell’s misplaced confidence. BIM would pay £63.2 million for MCC shares owned by Maxwell personally. Cook not only agreed to the ‘offer’ but did not demand that the shares be registered in BIM’s name. Instead, the shares remained registered as Maxwell’s property, and he borrowed another £26 million of the pension funds’ money to finance MCC. Cook would subsequently explain, ‘I didn’t realize the ownership could be abused.’
That March, Maxwell called in Cook twice more. The price of MCC shares was falling despite his prediction two months earlier and he wanted to push it back up. ‘I think it would be beneficial for BIM to buy more MCC shares,’ he said. Two deals were concluded, which were to lose the pension funds £7.4 million. On the 20th, BIM purchased a call option on 10 million MCC shares through Sheinberg at Goldman Sachs. Days before the end of the financial year, BIM paid £20 million for the shares, £2.4 million more than their worth, to boost MCC’s price. On 29 March, BIM sold 7.9 million MCC shares through Goldmans. In the second deal, BIM bought a call option from Goldmans on a further 10 million MCC shares for £18.9 million. One month later, the deal was booked to BIT (Bishopsgate Investment Trust, the nominee company used by Maxwell to retain pension fund shares and cash). The option, exercised on 29 June, cost BIM £5 million.
On 31 March 1990, the end of the financial year, Maxwell’s debt to the pension fund was still £13.5 million, so to remove it from the annual accounts he repaid it. The following day, he withdrew the money again. Thereafter his use of pension fund money rocketed. By 29 June, he had taken £105 million from BIM. To settle that debt, he told Cook that he was ‘selling’ to the pension funds his private stake in Invesco MIM and 5.4 million shares in Scitex, an Israeli high-tech company producing imaging systems for the publishing industry. Maxwell had bought 9.59 million Scitex shares (after rights issue) in December 1988 for $39 million or £24 million. Their value would rise to $220 million. The shares Maxwell offered Cook represented three-quarters of his stake in the company and would be worth £102 million.
Cook accepted this ‘offer’ too. He listed the Scitex and Invesco shares as part of BIM’s management of pension funds and removed Maxwell’s private £105 million debt from the accounts. But he failed to register the shares officially in Israel as owned by the pension fund. This, he explained, was ‘because I had signed a personal agreement with Robert Maxwell that he was holding the shares on BIM’s behalf. Even worse, he did not secure possession of the share certificates.
Maxwell’s complete control over BIM and the pension funds was, to his and Kevin’s increasing irritation, not duplicated at LBI, where a crisis had arisen among the directors. The cause was Mark Tapley, recruited as the new managing director in January 1990. Clean-cut, honest and ambitious to make his fortune in London’s rollicking financial markets, Tapley had been employed in the 1970s at J.P. Morgan and had been lured to LBI from Lehmans by Smith and Lord Donoughue on a generous salary for a three-year contract plus bonuses.
Within days of his arrival, Tapley had become alarmed by LBI’s administrative chaos, for which he blamed Larry Trachtenberg. He was also unhappy with Andrew Smith’s exaggerated claims about past performance and who, moreover, appeared to be trading in shares in what Tapley considered an unacceptable manner. ‘That’s a conflict of interest,’ he cautioned Smith. Soon afterwards, Smith returned to New York to establish LBI Inc. with £10 million capital provided by Maxwell, continuing his collaboration with Trachtenberg and Donoughue, although the latter referred to the American as ‘Adolf Smith’. ‘We must get rid of Trachtenberg,’ Tapley told Donoughue. ‘We must get him out of LBI.’ But Donoughue did not respond. By then, he had become Kevin’s confidant and no week passed without his name featuring in the Maxwell son’s diary.
On 1 April 1990, glancing at LBI’s 1989 accounts, Tapley noticed the high fees LBI was earning from the stock-lending programme. ‘Where are these fees coming from?’ he asked Trachtenberg. The American only replied, ‘It’s all done through Morgan Stanley with their guarantee.’ Tapley’s curiosity was not satisfied. Searching through the records of the stock lending, he came across the name of Thomas Christofferson, of Morgan Stanley. Christofferson was grateful to Kevin for placing LBI’s custodian business with his bank. It was an easy source of income. Until November 1991, Christofferson would, on demand from either Kevin or Trachtenberg, innocently sign letters and release share certificates which diverted the shares belonging to First Tokyo and others.
Although Tapley noticed that Trachtenberg was telephoning Morgan Stanley and ordering them to pledge First Tokyo’s shares to other banks as formal stock lending, reading LBI’s print-outs he was puzzled that they failed to identify the shares loaned. Instead, Trachtenberg’s oral instructions to Morgan Stanley were recorded on the computer only as ‘shares held on order of … bank’. Tapley demanded to know what was the authority for stock lending First Tokyo’s shares. ‘We’re doing it on Maxwell’s orders,’ stated Trachtenberg. He then added disingenuously: ‘We don’t know to whom the stock is being lent.’
Tapley’s initial concern had been that Trachtenberg was carelessly omitting to keep a record of his instructions to Morgan Stanley. By April