Ghislaine is not the first of the Maxwell clan to face criminal charges.
Her older brothers, Ian and Kevin, found themselves in the dock after their father’s death in 1991 when a £460m hole was discovered in the Mirror Group pension fund.
The two men, as chairman and publisher of the newspaper group, were acquitted of alleged conspiracy to defraud charges in 1996 following a four-year legal ordeal.
The media tycoon himself would almost certainly have faced charges had he not been found drowned after apparently falling from his yacht – called the Lady Ghislaine – off the Tenerife coast.
Ian, 64, and Kevin, 61, were last heard of in public in 2018, launching a UK thinktank, Combating Jihadist Terrorism and Extremism, based in Mayfair, in central London.
Its website shows Ian still as a director, though there appears to be no mention of Kevin.
A rare interview, with the Sunday Times, to launch the thinktank, revealed the brothers had spent the previous 20 years pursuing business ventures mainly outside the UK. Ian told the newspaper it was time to step out of the shadows. “One had to let a certain amount of time pass. We also had to pick ourselves up literally in every sense,” he said.
The brothers, who until the Jeffrey Epstein case were the most prominent of Maxwell’s surviving seven children, continued to work throughout their 1990s legal ordeal. They are said to have pursued business opportunities in Russia and eastern Europe, before branching out into property, energy and telecoms, mostly outside the UK.
In 2015, in the middle of the Greek financial crisis, the brothers launched an organisation similar to The Prince’s Trust, which allowed Greek entrepreneurs to apply for funding and advice.
Kevin has enjoyed a colourful business career. In 1992, one year after his father’s death, he was declared the biggest personal bankruptcy in British history, with debts of £406m.
The bankruptcy was lifted three years later. In 2011, he was banned from running a company for eight years following an investigation by the Insolvency Service.
He told the Sunday Times: “I have been in voluntary arrangements at least three times when things have looked dicey.”
Like all the Maxwell children, the two were regularly bullied by a father who thought nothing of humiliating them in public. The youngest, Ghislaine, it is said, was a “Daddy’s girl” and had it easier.
