The death has been announced of Basil Brookes, the former finance director at Maxwell Communication Corporation, and one of the whistleblowers to raise concerns over accounting issues within Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire, which included the Mirror newspaper
Brookes, who trained as a chartered accountant with Coopers & Lybrand, noted on his Linkedin career highlights: ‘Aged 32, first board position in a listed company was the kind of experience you never want to have again but an education that money can’t buy.’
He went on to become a founder director and shareholder of the information services company Wilmington Group which floated on the main London market in 1995. Brookes, who was 59 when he died, announced his retirement at the end of 2012 and went on to become a non-executive director at Benchmark Holdings.
Mark Solon, chairman of Wilmington Legal, said: ‘I knew Basil for several years as the CFO of Wilmington Plc. He was the ideal accountant: very good with detail, but with a commercial head.
‘These qualities enabled him to see the Maxwell accounts were true but significantly unfair, particularly for pensioners.
‘His involvement with Maxwell was dramatised by the BBC in the 2007 drama Maxwell, with David Suchet as the lead. Basil was very pleased he was played by the good looking Dan Stevens.’
Robert Maxwell died in 1991 after falling from his yacht, and was subsequently found to have taken hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds to shore up the shares of the Mirror Group, to save his companies from bankruptcy.
