MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 31) Financial Results: Informa, WoltersKluwer, Pearson, Reed Elsevier, Cengage, McGraw-Hill

Informa post half year results (Press Release)

• Resilient profit performance – adjusted operating profit growth of 0.6% to £160.1m; 0.3% on an organic basis
• Improved margin – adjusted operating margin 25.8% (H1 2011: 25.1%)
• Strong cash flow – cash conversion rate increased to 76% (H1 2011: 56%)
• Revenue decline of 2.4% (organic decline of 1.2%) – proactive reduction in marginal product.
• Statutory loss before tax of £27.4m (H1 2011: £66.5m profit) – reflecting impairment charge of £80.0m and losses on disposal of £24.4m relating to European Conference businesses. 
• Earnings increased – adjusted diluted earnings per share growth of 3.4% to 18.3p (H1 2011: 17.7p)
• Dividend increased – interim dividend increased to 6.0p (H1 2011: 5.0p)
• Net debt/EBITDA ratio of 2.3 times (H1 2011: 2.5 times)

Operational

• Academic division continues to trade well – organic revenue growth of 3.7%
• Total cost savings delivered at PCI of £12m
• 9 new large events run in H1
• Forward bookings on leading events remains strong
• Restructure of conference portfolio to reflect prevailing market conditions in Europe
• 20% of revenue from emerging markets (H1 2011: 19%)
• Acquisition of market leading exhibition and conference business in Canada

Wolters Kluwer reports half year results (Press Release)

• Full-year 2012 guidance confirmed. 
• Revenues up 3% in constant currencies and up 1% organically.
• Deterioration in Europe offset by improved organic growth in North America.
• Recurring revenues up 2% organically (76% of total revenues).
• Online, software and services revenues up 4% organically (75% of total revenues).
• Health and Financial & Compliance Services grew organically 5% and 6%, respectively.
• Ordinary EBITA €346 million; Ordinary EBITA margin of 19.9%. 
• Leverage ratio net-debt-to-EBITDA improves to 2.9x (2011 year-end: 3.1x).
• Expect to approach target of 2.5x by year-end.
• Healthcare Analytics disposal completed in May as part of pharma divestiture program.
• €100 million share buy-back completed on July 9; program will be expanded by up to €35 million under new policy to offset dilution from stock dividend and performance shares.

Pearson report half year results (Press Release):

Sales up 6% to £2.6bn*

• Strong growth in Education (up 9%) and the FT Group (up 7%).
• Penguin sales 4% lower on phasing of publishing schedule and continued industry change.

First-half operating profit lower, as expected, at £188m (2011: £208m)

• Education profits up 6% on growth in North America (up 30%) and International (up 17%).
• Professional profits £17m lower. New funding criteria for 16-18 year old apprenticeships result in sharp decline in volumes; UK training business reshaped.
• Sale of FTSE International reduces first-half operating profit by £10m; excluding FTSE, FT Group profits level in spite of increased restructuring charge.
• Penguin profits lower at £22m (H1 2011: £42m) on drop-through from lower first-half sales; stronger publishing schedule in H2.

Rapid growth in digital and services businesses and developing markets

• Sales up approximately 20% in developing markets (headline growth)
• Education digital platform registrations up 30%; FT digital subscriptions up 31% and now exceed print circulation; Penguin ebook revenues up 33% and now almost 20% of Penguin’s revenues.
• Revenues from digital and services to exceed traditional publishing businesses in 2012.

Full year outlook reiterated

• At this early stage, Pearson sees good trading momentum in North America, International and the FT Group offsetting weakness in Professional Education and Penguin.
• Pearson reiterates full year outlook of growth in sales and operating profits at constant exchange rates, with margins reflecting acquisition integration costs and the FTSE sale. 

Reed Elsevier report half year results (Press Release):

Financial highlights

• Underlying revenue growth +5% (+3% excluding biennial exhibition cycling)
• Underlying adjusted operating profit growth +7%; overall growth +8% at constant currencies
• Adjusted EPS +11% to 24.7p for Reed Elsevier PLC; +18% to €0.47 for Reed Elsevier NV
• Reported EPS growth +52% to 24.0p for Reed Elsevier PLC; +57% to €0.47 for Reed Elsevier NV
• Interim dividend growth +6% to 6.00p for Reed Elsevier PLC; +18% to €0.130 for Reed Elsevier NV
• Net debt of £3.3bn; 2.3 times adjusted 12 month trailing EBITDA (pensions and lease adjusted)

Operational highlights

• Underlying revenue and operating profit growth in all five business areas
• Growth driven by usage volume, new product development and expansion in high growth markets
• Further improvement in format mix; good growth in online and face to face
• Profitability gains driven by on-going process efficiencies
• Continued portfolio development improving revenue growth and profitability profile 

Selective divestitures

• Process accelerated in H1. Disposals of Totaljobs, MarketCast, and other small publishing and services assets completed. Planned disposals of Variety and RBI Australia announced. We expect completed and planned disposals to be mildly dilutive to EPS in the short term. However, we intend to use gross divestment proceeds to buy back shares this year, mitigating this impact. In H1 gross cash proceeds from disposals were £158m/€193m.

Cengage presents full year estimates (Press Release):

• Revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 is estimated to be between $499 million and $505 million as compared to $473 million for the same period in the prior year. Excluding National Geographic School Publishing (“NGSP”), acquired on August 1, 2011, revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 is estimated to be between $482 million and $488 million, driven primarily by growth in Domestic Learning.
• Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 is estimated to be between $187 million and $193million. NGSP’s contribution to Adjusted EBITDA during the fourth quarter is estimated to be between $2million and $3 million. The prior year fourth quarter Adjusted EBITDA of $202 million included a minimal expense for domestic incentive compensation. On a comparable basis to include this year’s fourth quarter domestic incentive expense, Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of the prior year would have been approximately $185 million.
• Revenue for the full year ended June 30, 2012 is estimated to be between $1,985 million and $1,991 million as compared to $1,876 million in the prior year. Excluding NGSP, revenue for the full year ended June 30, 2012 is estimated to be between $1,910 million and $1,915 million.
• Adjusted EBITDA for the full year ended June 30, 2012 is estimated to be between $781 million and $787million. NGSP’s contribution to Adjusted EBITDA during the fiscal year is estimated to be between $12million and $15 million. Similar to the fourth quarter, the prior year Adjusted EBITDA of $780 million included a minimal expense for domestic incentive compensation. On a comparable basis to include this fiscal year’s domestic incentive expense, Adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2011 would have been approximately $737 million.
• For the last twelve months ended June 30, 2012, Bank EBITDA is estimated to be between $817 million and $823 million.
• Full year investor call August 8th (Link)

McGraw-Hill reports second quarter results (Press Release):

• Key management for McGraw-Hill Education is now in place, including Lloyd G. "Buzz" Waterhouse as president and chief executive officer and Patrick Milano as chief financial officer and chief administrative officer.
• The Form 10 SEC registration statement was filed on July 11, 2012.
• Cost reductions are accelerating towards the goal to achieve at least $100 million in cost savings, on a run-rate basis, by year-end.
• Key workstreams are well underway to drive the separation of numerous finance & accounting, human resource, information technology, and other support services.
• The S&P Dow Jones Indices, the world's largest provider of financial market indices, was launched on June 29, 2012.

Education

• Revenue for the segment declined 12% to $474 million while operating profit improved by 36% to $57 million in the second quarter, compared to the same period last year. The improvement in operating income was primarily the result of restructuring actions and ongoing tight expense management.
• Higher Education, Professional and International Group (HPI): Revenue decreased 2% to $241 million in the second quarter compared to the same period last year. Higher Education revenue growth was offset by declines in International revenue, predominately related to the strong U.S. dollar. Higher Education's digital and customized products are being well received in the marketplace. In particular, sales of homework management product Connect, which is sold with LearnSmart, an adaptive learning system, grew by 65%. LearnSmart, designed to help college students learn faster, study more efficiently, and retain more knowledge, is available for approximately 150 different college course titles. 
• School Education Group (SEG): McGraw-Hill Professional continues to lead the transition to digital materials with 34% of revenue in the quarter derived from digital products and services. Of particular note was the 33% growth of digital subscription platforms, which include AccessMedicine, a product suite of subscription-based Websites that feature regularly updated medical content and access to more than 65 medical titles.Revenue decreased 20% to $233 million for the quarter. The elementary-high school market continues to be impacted by the economic issues facing the states and local school districts. In addition, the state new adoption schedule for 2012 offers the lowest revenue potential for publishers in many years. As a result, the School Education Group anticipates an overall reduction of 10% in the K–12 market this year, which represents the lowest spending level in over a decade. Despite the difficult environment, SEG continues to provide innovative products including new testing materials and programs in reading and mathematics that meet the new Common Core standards. All of its major new programs include digital components, and increasingly many products are wholly digital.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 47): Lobbying for On Line Learning, Loan Bubble + More

A long article on how government lobbying activities have brought about significant changes in the prospects for online learning companies (Nation):

Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping legislative success by combining the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements, prompting little public debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion.

In Florida, only fourteen months after Crist handed a major victory to teachers unions, a new governor, Rick Scott, signed a radical bill that could have the effect of replacing hundreds of teachers with computer avatars. Scott, a favorite of the Tea Party, appointed Levesque as one of his education advisers. His education law expanded the Florida Virtual School to grades K-5, authorized the spending of public funds on new for-profit virtual schools and created a requirement that all high school students take at least one online course before graduation.

“I’ve never seen it like this in ten years,” remarked Ron Packard, CEO of virtual education powerhouse K12 Inc., on a conference call in February. “It’s almost like someone flipped a switch overnight and so many states now are considering either allowing us to open private virtual schools” or lifting the cap on the number of students who can use vouchers to attend K12 Inc.’s schools. Listening to a K12 Inc. investor call, one could mistake it for a presidential campaign strategy session, as excited analysts read down a list of states and predict future victories.

And somewhat related: Is there a bubble in student education costs? ( New Yorker):

The bubble analogy does work in one respect: education costs, and student debt, are rising at what seem like unsustainable rates. But this isn’t the result of collective delusion. Instead, it stems from the peculiar economics of education, which have a lot in common with the economics of health care, another industry with a huge cost problem. (Indeed, in recent decades the cost of both college education and health care has risen sharply in most developed countries, not just the U.S.) Both industries suffer from an ailment called Baumol’s cost disease, which was diagnosed by the economist William Baumol, back in the sixties. Baumol recognized that some sectors of the economy, like manufacturing, have rising productivity—they regularly produce more with less, which leads to higher wages and rising living standards. But other sectors, like education, have a harder time increasing productivity. Ford, after all, can make more cars with fewer workers and in less time than it did in 1980. But the average student-teacher ratio in college is sixteen to one, just about what it was thirty years ago. In other words, teachers today aren’t any more productive than they were in 1980. The problem is that colleges can’t pay 1980 salaries, and the only way they can pay 2011 salaries is by raising prices. And the Baumol problem is exacerbated by the arms-race problem: colleges compete to lure students by investing in expensive things, like high-profile faculty members, fancy facilities, and a low student-to-teacher ratio.

From the twitter:

Anthony Burgess archive reveals vast body of previously unseen work Guardian

Hilary Mantel novel Wolf Hall will be part of a trilogy  Telegraph

Nora Roberts: The woman who rewrote the rules of romantic fiction Guardian

Reed Elsevier fails to impress analysts despite revenue growth Reuters

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 41): Frankfurt 2011, Indian Authors, Digital Rights,

Frankfurt has always been my favorite of the trade shows I've visited.  There's such a variety of people, customers and potential business partners that its unlike any other book show.

It is a gloomy day today and rain is forecast for tomorrow but the threat of industrial action may be less imminent since the government has become directly involved in getting the parties to negotiate. 

A delegation from India is presenting a collection of indigenous Indian works for translation as reported by India's Daily News and Analysis:

In a first showcase of Indian indigenous writing, a literary panorama featuring works by over 30 language writers will be on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair in a pilot exhibition for readers and publishers from Europe, the US and other countries.

The literary panorama, initiated by the union culture ministry under the 'ILA: Indian Literature Abroad' project, will be held Oct 12-16.

The project aims to carry the diversity of contemporary regional Indian literature from the grassroots to the world through source translation, which involves creation of original work directly to foreign languages in an attempt to remove dependence on English translation, a top ILA official said.

Initially, the focus of translation is on six UNESCO languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

“The project requires patience and nurturing. It is (in the) long term. We want to understand the kind of Indian language books the international market likes and the market dynamics. We are looking at source language translations - like from Tamil to French," writer Namita Gokhale, the member secretary of Indian Literature Abroad project, told IANS.

"Translating a regional literary work first into English and then into a foreign language results in loss of textual matter,” she said.

“Different cultures appreciate different kind of literature,” she added.

Gokhale heads the delegation carrying the Indian literary showcase to Frankfurt Tuesday.

A discussion, 'Romancing the Languages: Indian Literature's Journeys' will debate on the future of Indian regional language writing and its global positioning Oct 13.

The Bookseller doesn't expect the slow global economy to impact the US business at Frankfurt (Bookseller):

Meanwhile, organisers are expecting 7,500 exhibitors at the fair, as the halls reach capacity. FBF spokesperson Katja Boehne said there will be 761 exhibitors from the UK and 604 from the US, with between 280,000 to 290,000 visitors set to come through the doors—of which around 150,000 will be trade visitors. She said: "We will see at this book fair what publishers have made of the digital options. There will be lots of enhanced e-books and multimedia projects, some of which we don't have a name for. There will be a large dollop of creativity and new ideas."

Boehne added that the numbers of exhibitors and visitors was "more or less" the same as last year, as the fair has "come to the end of capacity; there is no space left for extra exhibitors".

In Publishers' Weekly Rachel Deahl suggests this years Frankfurt will be about digital rights just like last year and the year before and she concludes, (PW):

And then there’s the growing concern and confusion over e-books and the open market. Under the reigning territorial model, the open market right allows publishers to sell English-language books in European countries outside the U.K. Whether the open market can, or should, be preserved in the digital world is a recurring question. A recent court ruling, outside the book world, may also be a topic of conversation in Frankfurt. In Football Association Premier League Ltd. et al. v. QC Leisure et al., an E.U. court just ruled that a British pub owner was not legally allowed to use a decoder to air Greek soccer games in her bar; without the decoder she would have had to pay a licensing fee to Sky Sport. The ruling had to do with the fact that Sky Sport had negotiated an exclusive licensing fee with the Premier League to air its games in the U.K., and, although the decoders are legal, they cannot be used to show the games to a group. Attorney C.E. Petit, who blogs about publishing and the law at Scrivener’s Error, picked up on the case and noted that the judgment might have implications in the book world. Since Europe is now under a more unified copyright law, with the establishment of the E.U., there could be a case about multiple English-language editions being sold in Europe. In other words, there could now be legal ground for stamping out the open market in publishing.

A not well known Irish author Flann O'Brien gets and appreciation from More Intelligent Life:

Despite the pseudonym, everyone in Dublin’s incestuous literary circles knew him. When he started openly mocking the civil service and expressing political opinions—a serious transgression for an employee of the state—he was invited to retire at age 42, in 1953. His pension, together with the slender income from his writing, might have let him succeed as a novelist. But O’Nolan was better at self-sabotage than self-promotion, and he died at 54 of cancer and alcoholism. He still left behind five novels, three of uneven quality and two, “At Swim-Two-Birds” and “The Third Policeman”, that are among the greatest accomplishments in English-language fiction.

He finished “At Swim-Two-Birds” when he was 28 and sent it off to Longmans, a London publisher, where by a rare stroke of good luck Graham Greene was reader. “I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage,” recalled Greene, who urged publication. From Paris, James Joyce, in a blurb written to help promote the book, pronounced its author “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” O’Nolan was cautiously optimistic. But the cosmic balance was soon restored. War broke out and in 1940 the Luftwaffe destroyed the London warehouse in which the entire print run of the novel was stored; fewer than 250 had been sold. Then in 1941 Joyce, who had promised to help with publicity, suddenly died, along with O’Nolan’s hopes for the book. “[I]t must be a flop,” he wrote, wallowing in gloom. “I guess it is a bum book anyhow.”

From the twitter this week:

The adventures of Tintin – and CGI http://gu.com/p/32etq/tw

Armour to stand down as Reed finance chief - FT.com - Mediahttp://on.ft.com/nHFHnJ

Stars Will Read Amazon Unit's New Audio Book Series:http://nyti.ms/nWdh4E

Beyond the Book with Elsevier's Rafael Sidi

From his beyond the book series, Chris Kennealy interviews Rafael Sidi, Elsevier VP of Product Management for Applications Marketplace and Developer Network.

“We are letting [researchers] play with our data and build on top of our data stuff that they need to build. In the end, scientists and researchers know their problem better than us.”

Sidi cited a variety of innovative application efforts, including for SciVerse, which offers developers access to Elsevier content, and the community driven projects Apps for Science Challenge and Apps for Library Idea Challenge. (Interview)

Some clips from the transcript of the interview:

So what we are trying to do with the data, we want to give access to our data as we’ve been giving, to make that data easily remixable, reusable among the developers. And wanting that, I’ve been saying that if we let the data to be used by the scientists, by the researchers within our environment, they are going to be able to create much, much better solutions. They are going to be able to create solutions that we couldn’t have imagined.

So what we are doing is just we are going to the crowd. We are letting them play with our data and build on top of our data stuff that they need to build, because at the end, scientists and researchers, they know their problem better than us, in some cases, and what we are doing, we are giving them the tools and we are providing the services for them in this application and developer network in our framework so that they can build using our services and tools.

....

Good question. What we are trying to do right now is to reach out to the community, to the crowd. We’ve been doing different challenges. I mentioned we had a challenge at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Our first one was at New Jersey Institute of Technology. And what we are doing right now, currently we have two different challenges going on.

One, we call it Apps for Science. It’s a challenge among six countries where we are asking developers to submit applications and then we are giving them prizes. And the other challenge that we are doing among our librarians, Apps for Library. So we are asking to librarians to submit ideas. And we are going to – again, a judging committee is going to pick the ideas and then what we are planning to do, some of the ideas we are going to go to our developer network and develop, and those ideas are going to be developed by the developer network.

So, so far, we’ve seen an excellent biomedical image search application that is going to be built by the University of Madison, Wisconsin. So we are getting some ideas that we haven’t thought about it.Just recently, we launched a new app from a company called iSpeech and the app takes the text and then translates to words, so you can just hear the text. And that’s also very important for us in terms of accessibility to the content, making the content easily accessible to everyone. So I if I have an impairment, then I can listen to the text.

2/16/99: ReedElsevier, Harpercollins, Bertelsmann,

Publishing News: 2/16/99
Newcomb leads race for Reed Elsevier CEO
Children's Television Workshop Signs Agreement Random House Inc.
Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine
Trinity opens due diligence on Mirror
HarperCollins Announces Plans to Acquire the Ecco Press
Bertelsmann expects JV with Havas in 2 weeks time
Coopers & Lybrand pays $5.4MM in Maxwell case

Newcomb leads race for Reed Elsevier CEO
Don’t be surprised to see ex Simon & Schuster CEO Jon Newcomb made Chairman and CEO of UK/Dutch publishing giant Reed Elsevier. Industry sources peg him as the leading candidate for the job which has essentially been vacant for five months.

Children's Television Workshop Signs Agreement Random House Inc.
Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the multimedia educational company that created "Sesame Street," has agreed a long-term development agreement with Random House Inc. CTW has also agreed to pursue television production initiatives with Random House, whose parent company Bertelsmann AG has extensive broadcast channel and programming holdings in Europe. As of July 1, the Random House Children's Media Group will build on its long-term relationship with CTW and "Sesame Street" books by adding new formats such as storybooks, color and activity books, and workbooks for publication and distribution in the United States and Canadian markets. By further expanding and combining its own 30-year-old publishing program with Random House to include these new formats, CTW will be able to create a more visible and synergistic presence at retail for its books as well as a stronger, more broadly integrated publishing program. Both companies will explore developing books from CTW television properties other than "Sesame Street" and creating television programming based on book properties whose dramatic rights are held by Random House Children's Media Group
Source: Businesswire 2/11/99

Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine
Miramax Films and Hearst Magazines announced today that they have entered into a joint-venture agreement to publish Talk, a new general interest monthly magazine edited by Tina Brown. The magazine will debut in August with the September, 1999 edition. Under the terms of the agreement, Hearst Magazines, the world's largest publisher of monthly magazines, will take a 50 percent joint-ownership stake in Talk magazine and assume certain management responsibilities including circulation and manufacturing management, as well as newsstand distribution and subscription fulfillment through its subsidiaries Hearst Distribution Group, Inc. and Communications Data Services. Miramax's Talk Media will be responsible for editorial content, advertising sales and marketing. Talk magazine, which will premiere with a circulation of 500,000, will be a provocative and topical publication offering commentary, criticism, reporting, opinion and profiles. In July of last year, Miramax Films established Talk Media in conjunction with Tina Brown and Ron Galotti to publish Talk magazine, produce television programming and publish books.
Source Businesswire 2/11/99

Trinity opens due diligence on Mirror
TRINITY, the UK's largest regional newspaper group, has begun due diligence at the Mirror Group in preparation for a second assault on the embattled newspaper company later this month. The news comes only days after it emerged that Regional Independent Media, publisher of the Yorkshire Post, was likely to revise its £913 million cash offer for the Mirror over the next few weeks. However, many believe the new bid will not be much higher than the 200p a share already offered. It is understood that over the past two days Trinity has been given access to a "data room" containing commercially sensitive information about the Mirror, whose national newspaper titles include The Mirror and The People. Trinity is believed to have seen the commercial data for only 24 hours, and has already requested more detailed information. However, Trinity is not expected to make a bid for the Mirror immediately, because it feels it needs to look further into the finances of the company. Those close to the situation believe a bid is more likely over the next few weeks. The bidding battle for the Mirror has already resulted in a bloody boardroom coup at the company, which saw the dramatic resignation of David Montgomery as its chief executive last month.
Source: Financial Times 2/15/99

HarperCollins Announces Plans to Acquire the Ecco Press
Jane Friedman, President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers today announced that HarperCollins will purchase The Ecco Press, one of the country's most prestigious literary publishers. The acquisition will become effective as of July 1. The Ecco list includes such critically acclaimed authors as John Ashbery, Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, Gerald Early, Richard Ford, Louise Gluck, Robert Hass, Zbigniew Herbert, Bobbi Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tobias Wolff. In addition, Halpern will publish his first books with HarperCollins starting in January, 2000.
Source: Businesswire 2/16/99

Bertelsmann expects JV with Havas in 2 weeks time
German media giant Bertelsmann AG expects to complete a joint venture deal on specialist publishing with France's Havas within the next two weeks. A spokesman for Bertelsmann's specialist publishing unit said the deal entailed a 50-50 joint venture with the aim of making international acquisitions together. In a related issue, the spokesman also said that Bertelsmann's takeover of the Springer scientific publishing house had been approved by the European Union cartel authorities. The acquisition increases the value of Bertelsmann's trade publishing activities to 1.5 billion marks ($859.6 million) from 625 million marks
Source: Reuters 2/16/99

Coopers & Lybrand pays $5.4MM in Maxwell case
Coopers & Lybrand has paid fines and costs of $5.4MM for failings in its role as auditor of most of the companies controlled by the late Robert Maxwell, a British accounting watchdog said on this week. Maxwell died in November 1991 (fell off his boat), leaving behind a business empire riddled with debts and huge holes in the pension funds of his companies, including Mirror Group Newspapers which Maxwell owned at the time.
Source: Reuters 2/16/99