Wiretaps Put New Twist on Maxwell Mess : Publishing: Paper says discovery of bugs suggests media magnate could spy on directors who had grown suspicious.

In a further twist in the collapse of Robert Maxwell’s media empire, British fraud investigators were expected Saturday to launch a fresh probe after bugging devices were found in the late tycoon’s London headquarters.

Mirror Group Newspapers Chairman Ernest Burrington told officers of the Serious Fraud Office that a wiretap had been found in the telephone of the company’s finance director, Lawrence Guest, a company statement said.

“The wiretap, which was still active, led to a tape recorder in an office in a nearby building which was part of the Maxwell Group,” the statement said.

Listening devices were also believed to have been installed in the offices of other senior directors and a boardroom at Mirror Group headquarters.

The Financial Times said that the discovery of the devices suggests Maxwell was able to eavesdrop on the conversations of senior directors who had become concerned about the business’s financial health in the weeks before Maxwell died on Nov. 5.

The bugging charge was made after a week of astonishing events in the Maxwell saga.

The Maxwell empire collapsed Thursday after sons and heirs Kevin and Ian Maxwell called in court administrators exactly a month after their father died at sea off the African coast, falling overboard from his yacht.

Potential buyers are preparing to swoop down on fragments of the empire after the administrators took charge of Maxwell’s key private holding companies to salvage what they could from debts of more than $2.5 billion.

The collapse clouded the future of newspapers around the world and threatened to set off a political dispute over a suggestion that Britain’s Conservative government knew Maxwell was in trouble months ago.

Fraud investigators on Friday began searches at Maxwell’s London offices in connection with transfers of more than $900 million from the pension fund of the Daily Mirror--Maxwell’s flagship British newspaper--that may have been used to support other debt-laden Maxwell firms.

The Financial Times reported that the New York Daily News was the probable recipient of $85 million that vanished from Mirror Group Newspapers this year.

Kevin Maxwell vowed Friday to keep the Daily News alive. He said that his father had pumped Maxwell company money into the ailing newspaper since rescuing it from closure last March, but he declined to say where that money came from.

The Daily News has filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors.