Anyone who has received or ever will receive Bulgaria’s highest honour, the Stara Planina First Class, is joining a club of which the late Robert Maxwell, press baron and robber baron, was a member.

The order was conferred on Maxwell in 1983, a token of the cordial relations he had assiduously built up with Bulgaria’s communist regime headed by Todor Zhivkov.
The same Zhivkov who was in the pantheon of Soviet-era dictators about whom Maxwell produced hagiographic biographies, in the case of Zhivkov, a 1985 volume entitled Todor Zhivkov:

Statesman and Builder of New Bulgaria and the same Zhivkov who gave written permission in 1987 for the regime to operate joint ventures with Maxwell.
Footage still exists of a fawning Maxwell placing his considerable bulk on an official socialist sofa opposite the veteran Bulgarian chief; the association between Zhivkov, who true to his age attempted to display a rigorous intellect alongside his other talents, and Maxwell, the ruthless and opportunistic capitalist, was hardly concealed. On the contrary, it seemed a matter for propaganda on one side and boasting on the other.

In 1989, a year that was to prove to be part of the final act of the Zhivkov tragic-comedy of economic mismanagement and political suppression, saw the Robert Maxwell International Management School open in Sofia.

Maxwell also had the largest stake in an entity called the Maxwell Central and East European Partnership, said to have had $250 million at the time of its founding during the communist era.  

The facts related so far, and they are all incontrovertible facts, fit a neat narrative of a strange yet opportunistic, if not symbiotic, relationship between communist Bulgaria’s leadership and the larger-than-life character who had been born in poverty in 1923 in rural Czechoslovakia, evaded annihilation in the Holocaust, won a field commission as a captain in the British army and, post-war, armed with a suitably British name in place of the one with which he had been born, built himself up as a tycoon with millions in bank accounts at his disposal.

Beyond this point, there are further facts, but varying theories as to what to make of them.

No one can call into question that there was a working relationship between Maxwell and Andrei Loukanov, the senior communist-era apparatchik who emerged post-1990 as even more powerful, enough to be prime minister for a time, but more importantly having at his disposal vast sums of money that allegedly had its provenance in Bulgaria’s state treasury.

Loukanov was involved with the Neva project, said to have been initiated by the KGB, figures from Bulgaria’s communist-era State Security and Maxwell, to make the most of large sums - including in foreign currency - and move it about as best suited those involved. In 1996, prosecutors moved against a number of senior figures, including former ministers, deputy ministers and a former ambassador to the US, all for alleged serious fraud through their involvement in Neva. Neva also was the subject of allegations related to supposed attempts to thieve Western computer technology.

In turn, there was the founding of Multigroup, the aptly-named enterprise that had endeavours of many kinds throughout the economy in transition and never was without money and influence, no matter what travails Bulgaria and ordinary Bulgarians passed through.

Maxwell, whose baffling collection of hundreds of firms included ownership of Bulgarian Co-operative Bank, is alleged in some quarters to have been the founder of Multigroup.

While much of this material, in some cases specifically related to whatever was the precise role of Maxwell, has made its way into books, websites and less formal narrations of conspiracy theories, what is striking is that several who featured prominently in the narrative of those changing times tended to end up dead, in circumstances either questionable (as in the case of Maxwell) or as victims of assassination (in October 1996, Loukanov, and in March 2003, a day after giving evidence at the Loukanov murder trial, Multigroup president Iliya Pavlov.

Some years earlier, in 1995, Pavlov had been appointed to replace Loukanov as head of TopEnergy, a joint venture with Russia’s Gazprom. Media reports in the past have suggested that there is a tradition of cordial relations between Multigroup and Gazprom.

It is a frequently-told tale that networks that had been established among Bulgaria’s communist-era establishment, notably its security apparatus, were the foundations of enterprises post-communism. Given that there always was an international dimension to the covert transactions of communist Bulgaria, it is no surprise that after "the changes", someone like Maxwell would be likely to be accorded a place in the changing story.

This ground has been traversed, variously and with various theories, by Maxwell biographer Russell Davies in Foreign Body, by author Martin Dillon and a number of others.
Some of the allegations have been denied by some of those involved, notably Loukanov who, nine months before his fatal shooting, went on record as denying having been involved in illegal dealings with Maxwell.

These denials covered allegations that had been published in The Guardian and separate claims in the Financial Times, that Maxwell had assisted Zhivkov, Loukanov and Ognyan Doinov (formerly a politburo member and later a Maxwell employee in Vienna) in illegally transferring vast sums in Bulgarian state funds to bank accounts abroad, money that was repatriated to fund private endeavours. Doinov is no longer available to confirm or deny any allegations related to Maxwell because his health problems caught up with him.

Other allegations that have been aired is that Maxwell already had been involved in laundering money during the communist era, through the film industry and real estate transactions.

After the fall of communism, politician Ilko Eshkenazi had quite a bit to say about alleged dealings involving Maxwell, but that source of allegations was cut off abruptly by a jetski accident at Bulgaria’s Black Sea.

Another set of names frequently mentioned in connection with Maxwell are those of Russia’s Sointsevo group and one Semion Mogilevich, who had an array of legitimate companies in five countries including the United States, but who at one point was expelled from the United Kingdom as persona non grata, while another Maxwell associate was said to have been Ivo Yanchev, a former Bulgarian secret service officer. Yanchev became Multigroup’s representative in Skopje, but in April 1996 was found dead in a hotel in Sofia in what police said was a suicide.

A further acquaintance said to have been made by Maxwell was Michael Chorni, now an Israeli passport-holder of Russian descent and the owner of substantial business interests in Bulgaria, along with being the head of a charity foundation, although the first government that took power after the post-1997 fall of the then Bulgarian Socialist Party cabinet ordered Chorni out of Bulgaria as an alleged threat to national security.

During the time of the BSP government headed by Zhan Videnov, one of the business groupings seen as among the most powerful in the country was the Orion Circle, said to have provided funding to the party; as with all statements regarding party political funding, opacity has been the order of the day for years.

Author Dillon has said that during the Loukanov era, Maxwell used a $2.5 million sum to acquire a 10 per cent share in the Bank for Agriculture Credit, a bank that attracted very large deposits. In turn, Maxwell is said to have been the beneficiary of loans through his joint venture, Bimex.

It is questionable to what extent the seemingly desultory process of dealing with the darkest eras of Bulgaria’s communist past would turn up any documentation related to Maxwell to clarify or deny allegations against him during that part of the country’s past. Given Bulgaria’s well-known ineffectual conduct against organised crime, there seems scant hope of much clarity about what Maxwell may or may not have been involved in, or even simply been aware of, questionable transactions after the end of communism, or at least up to the point of his 1991 death. (Allowing, for the record, that there is a conspiracy theory that his death was faked.)

As to the final notes on the mysteries that surround Maxwell and Bulgaria, there is one that is related to that very death. Reports have unearthed the fact that he was monitored by Western intelligence as early as the 1950s as a suspected Soviet agent. More recently, Dillon and co-author Gordon Thomas said in their 2002 book that Maxwell was "Israel’s Superspy" and had been assassinated by Mossad for reasons related to financial embarrassment caused by him. (Maxwell supposedly, in the course of this claimed career working for Israel, marketed Promis software that was said to have the advantage  – or disadvantage, from the point of view of intelligence services that bought it – of acting as spyware for Israel.

Then there is the other theory that has currency in various quarters, that a few weeks before Maxwell’s death, he had been visited by Loukanov, who allegedly had damaging information on the murder in London of dissident Georgi Markov - that it had been committed with the involvement of an MI6 double agent in Sofia. Gordon Logan, who has a number of documents on the internet propounding the theory, in 2000 sent letters to 39 UK MPs saying that the Markov and Maxwell murders were directly related and were the "crown jewels of MI6 murders, and required revisiting".

All of this is quite likely, as with so much about Maxwell and Bulgaria, in the realm of speculation. In the event that documentation exists to offer either positive or negative proofs, it may turn out that Maxwell got that Stara Planina just for fawning over Zhivkov and following it up with some investments (later, let it not be forgot, Maxwell showed that business was always uppermost in his mind when he visited Bulgaria amid the crumbling of communism to look into purchasing Zhivkov’s expansive villa where the sea laps the shore at Perla on the southern Black Sea coast).

As portrayed in the recent biographical film starring David Suchet as Maxwell, the tycoon had his own understanding as to the meaning of the "Max Factor" term applied to him. Whatever the "Max Factor" was when it was at play in Bulgaria is likely forever to remain a mystery.


From the Robert Maxwell file:

Born Ján Ludvík Hoch, June 10 1923, in the village of Slatinské Doly,  Carpathian Ruthenia, the easternmost province of pre-World War 2 Czechoslovakia (now part of Slatina-Doly in Ukraine, also called Solotvino in Russian).

World War 2: NCO, later commissioned as a captain; in January 1945, he received the Military Cross,
although media reports say thatbefore his death
he was being investigated for allegedly having
committed a war crime by murdering a German
civilian. After some experiments with new names,
by the close of World War 2 he had taken the name
Ian Robert Maxwell.

1951: Buys Pergamon Press and begins building publishing empire, but early career blighted by scandal when a department of trade and industry report describes him as unfit to run a publicly listed company.

1964 - 1970: Labour MP.

By the 1980s Maxwell’s various companies owned the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail and several other newspapers, Pergamon Press, Nimbus Records, Collier books, Maxwell Directories, Prentice Hall Information Services, Macmillan (US) publishing, and the Berlitz language schools. He also owned a half-share of MTV in Europe and other European television interests, Maxwell Cable TV and Maxwell Entertainment. In 1987 Maxwell purchased part of IPC Media to create Fleetway Publications.

By late 1990 his debts were out of control and suspicions were growing about his abuse of company pension schemes.

Died November 5 1991, having gone overboard from his yacht at sea off the Canary Islands. Two successive autopsies, by Spanish and Israeli doctors, appeared to show contradictory results.

After his death, the Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection and thousands of employees lost their pensions.