THE ARREST of Kevin and lan Maxwell and their late father's sidekick Larry Trachtenberg on charges relating to Cap'n Bob's E1 billion fraud was a flimsy figleaf to conceal the blushes of the establishment.
Until just before the arrests police had been insisting that their inves. tigations would take months to comMANAGEMENT at the plete. And there is no chance of court action before next January.
The highly-publicised dawn arrests - complete with live television coverage, with only Pandora 'Piss Off Maxwell apparently not tipped off in advance - were designed to take the heat off the government.
Highly embarrassing revelations of the extent to which the dead tycoon's movements had been monitored by the secret services have done nothing to prove the Tory case that they knew nothing of Maxwel's wrongdoings.
As Steve Bell's brillant cartoon in the Guardian summed up, the spooks' verdict on Maxwell was It's OK - he's a fat crook, but he's not in CND'.
The state turned a blind eye not only to Maxwell's business swindles, but even to his role as a banker for the KGB. But while when the board of Mirror Group Newspapers carried out a pretend Emest Burrington from the Chair, only to replace him with banker Sir Robert Clark, a close confidante of the Maxwell brothers and a non-executive director under Maxwell!
With a news-hungry Financial Times leading the pack of joumalists pursuing the issue, government, banks and the police found a com. mon sense of embarrassment which led to the dawn swoop.
But the charges so far laid against the Maxwell brothers relate to reiative peanuts - a total of £135 million, mainly in transactions after Maxwell's death. This is just scratching the surface.
Frank Fiold MP has suggested as much as £1 billion may have been around, wealthy and scot-free, after a few months in open prison foilowed by his miraculous 'cure' from Alzheimer's disease, shows how litte the Maxwells have to fear from Bntish justice. End business secrets Nothing could more clearly underline the fact that business secrets under capitalism are designed purely to keep secrets from the workforce and to protect the guilty.
The media unions should take up he fight for the opening of the books of the Maxwell empire, while in every firm unions must demand a full opening of the books and workers' control of pension funds.