Ghislaine is not the first of the Maxwell clan to face criminal charges.
Her older brothers Ian and Kevin met on the dock after their father’s death in 1991, when a £ 460 million hole was discovered in the Mirror Group pension fund.
The two men, as president and editor of the newspaper group, were acquitted of an alleged conspiracy to defraud the defendants in 1996 after a four-year legal trial.
The media magnate would surely have faced charges if he had not been found drowned after apparently falling off his yacht, called Lady Ghislaine, on the Tenerife coast.
Ian, 64, and Kevin, 61, were last heard in public in 2018, launching a UK expert group, Combating Terrorism and Jihadist Extremism, based in Mayfair, central London .
His website still lists Ian as director, though Kevin doesn’t appear to be mentioned.
A rare interview, with the Sunday Times, to launch the expert group, revealed that the brothers had spent the past 20 years looking for business ventures primarily outside the UK. Ian told the newspaper that it was time to come out of the shadows. “You had to let a certain amount of time pass. We also had to literally get up in every way, ”he said.
The brothers, who until Jeffrey Epstein’s case were Maxwell’s seven most prominent surviving children, continued to work through his ordeal of legal experience in the 1990s. They are said to have sought business opportunities in Russia and Eastern Europe, before diversifying into property, energy and telecommunications, mainly outside the UK.
In 2015, in the midst of the Greek financial crisis, the brothers launched an organization similar to The Prince’s Trust, which allowed Greek entrepreneurs to apply for funding and advice.
Kevin has enjoyed a colorful business career. In 1992, a year after his father’s death, he was declared the largest personal bankruptcy in British history, with debts of £ 406 million.
The bankruptcy was lifted three years later. In 2011, he was banned from running a company for eight years after an investigation by the Insolvency Service.
He told the Sunday Times: “I have been in voluntary agreements at least three times when things looked uncertain.”
Like all of Maxwell’s children, the two were regularly bullied by a father who did not think of humiliating them in public. The youngest, Ghislaine, is said to have been a “daddy’s girl” and he had it easier.
