Crew heard last words - to turn up the aircon

The last words of Robert Maxwell were communicated at 4.45am on November 5, 1991 when he contacted the bridge of his luxury yacht to complain about the temperature of his cabin, demanding, in his customary gruff tone, that the crew turn up the air-conditioning.

Twelve hours later a Spanish fisherman spotted his naked body floating in the Atlantic, 24km from his boat.

In the days that followed the news of his death, it emerged there was plenty to trouble Britain's most flamboyant media baron.

For several months his business empire had been on the brink of collapse. Without authority, he had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' staff pension funds to finance his corporate debt, his frantic takeovers and his lavish lifestyle. Thousands of Maxwell employees were to lose their pensions.

But he had overcome much worse. In 1954 his publishing warehouse company Simpkin Marshall was declared insolvent and in 1971 he was humiliated by a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry which had declared him unfit to run a public company.

No-one can be really sure what was going through the mind of Maxwell when he left his cabin and made his way to the aft of his £15 million ($40 million) yacht.

There was certainly nothing in his previous life which had suggested he was the kind of man who would lose much sleep over a financial crisis. He started life with nothing, and was forced to go to Britain as a 17-year-old refugee fleeing the Nazi tyranny.

As Tom Bower, one of his biographers, points out in Maxwell: The Final Verdict, this was not new: "Anyone who had fought on the front line from the Normandy beaches to Germany, facing constant danger and death for months on end from the enemy's snipers and shells, was unlikely to suffer fear."

A subsequent inquest into his death failed to answer any of the key questions. The medical evidence was equivocal. Three pathologists who carried out autopsies failed to agree about his death. One concluded he died of a heart attack, another said he suffered a heart attack and drowned while a third dismissed the heart condition as a cause of death saying he had fallen into the sea and drowned.

Such contradiction and inconsistency only served to trigger a flood of theories attempting to explain his possible state of mind and the circumstances of his demise.

One of the most lurid was that Maxwell was a key informer for Israeli intelligence and that Israel was concerned that he was about to go public.

Over time the idea that Maxwell was prepared to treacherously turn against Israel has been largely dismissed as fantasy.

Certainly the Israeli Government didn't treat him as a traitor. Maxwell was accorded the next best thing to a state funeral, with President Chaim Herzog intoning over his corpse as it lay in Israel's Hall of the Nation: "He was a figure of almost mythological stature."

Death at sea

The undisputed facts on the night of his death are these.

Robert Maxwell was 68, in poor health, 140kg and with a weak heart and lungs.

Shortly before dawn he left his cabin and went to the rear of the boat.

His door was bolted from the outside.

He fell forward over a low rail and dangled over the water 3m below.

He clung on with his weaker left arm, tearing the muscles on that side of his body.

- Independent