It was a terrible blow.”He said he was in a meeting when he heard the news and had to ask the people present to leave so “I could gather myself. It was the shock of thinking that he had fallen off the boat,” he said.”I was breathless. It was extremely hard to do anything and I recall the physical shock of the news. I wasn’t thinking on those lines and never did.”Mr Jones asked Kevin Maxwell about his emotions when he first heard his father was missing “It was a terrible feeling I can’t really explain it. It occurred to me it might be an accident, might be murder, there might be a robbery motive.”It never occurred to me that he would have committed suicide although that theory became popular as the days went by.

It is not the safest part of the vessel,” he said.The court has heard the public perception that “it was suicide by a man who knew the game was up” caused a disastrous plunge in the share price of the Maxwell empire.Questioned by his counsel Alun Jones QC about his reaction to his father’s death, Kevin Maxwell recounted “the physical loss and the fact he hadn’t been found, it was a terrible burden .. I was extremely concerned We had no idea how my father had met his death. Kevin Maxwell told the jury in the six-month trial yesterday that his father was “quite a light sleeper” when on board the vessel, which had been bought in 1986.”He would frequently get up in the middle of the night and found it more convenient, as a lot of men do on a boat, to relieve themselves over the side as it was moving,” he said.He told the court the spot the newspaper magnate chose was next to the lifeboat and was not protected by a handrail “There are two thin pieces of wire there. His death came as his media empire was on the brink of collapse. The county that has benefited most is South Yorkshire, which has won almost pounds 53m – or pounds 49.46 per head. At the other end, Bedfordshire has benefited by just pounds 54,072 since grants began in April – equivalent to 10p per head of population.. JOHN WILLCOCK

Financial Correspondent
Kevin Maxwell told an Old Bailey jury yesterday that he thought his father died after falling off his yacht while urinating over the side.Robert Maxwell drowned in the Atlantic in November 1991 after disappearing from his pounds 10m yacht Ghislaine as it cruised off the Canary Islands. Worst off is the East Midlands region which receives pounds 3.50 per person, a total of pounds 14.4m.The figures are described by the Directory, which carried out the survey on behalf of BBC2’s Newsnight, as evidence of a huge disparity in lottery spending.

Greater London gets nearly pounds 21 per person in grants, compared with pounds 10 for Yorkshire and Scotland. Research by the Directory of Social Change shows that of pounds 570m in lottery money awarded so far, more than pounds 142m has been given to the region. The next largest donations have been to Yorkshire and Humberside (pounds 65m) and Scotland (pounds 52m). The long-awaited announcement follows harsh criticism that the quango, set up to distribute lottery funds to charity, has spent too much on administration and has been too slow to pay out cash.The Government’s announcement yesterday came as it was revealed that almost a quarter of National Lottery grants had gone to Greater London. NCVO bosses have warned that charities could have lost pounds 300m since the lottery began last November. Councils are also to be surveyed for their views on the system for allocating lottery cash.The Home Office minister, Baroness Blatch, said the Government had always been committed to monitoring the effects of the lottery on charities. She said early evidence did not indicate that the there had been a significant effect.But Janet Morrison, director of policy at the NCVO, suggested that ministers had been pushed into taking action.

She said that research so far showed that most fund-raising charities were suffering badly.Last month the Royal National Institute for the Blind said donations had fallen by a third since November and officials said the charity had been deprived of an estimated pounds 500,000 in the past year.Camelot, the lottery operator, welcomed the move, saying that claims about the way charities were suffering had so far been based only on anecdotal evidence.On Monday the National Lottery Charities Board will finally announce its first grants, totalling about pounds 40m. The Home Office announced the setting up of a research project to examine the impact after complaints about the damage being caused.Charities welcomed the move, with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations saying ministers were “responding positively” to concerns. MARIANNE MACDONALD

Arts Reporter
The Government is to monitor the effect the National Lottery is having on donations to charities, it was announced yesterday. This would be intended to reinforce the appellation, which is designated regionally.The AC designation has been widely trusted, especially by foreign wine- buyers, as a sign of reliable quality at a reasonable price.

But Mr Berger said some wine producers, succumbing to market pressures, were over-watering their vines or adding sugar to enhance the alcohol content. “Abuses” were on the increase.David Howse, spokesman for Threshers Wines, said yesterday: “In January this year, we accepted seven or eight French clarets and we rejected more than 1,500 samples.”French wine dealers have had it so easy for so long, they think ‘Why try?’ The AC label means it has reached a standard but it is only like saying you have passed a GCSE, whether it’s an A pass or an F pass. And recently the French have been turning in F marks instead of A marks.”Janet Lee, PR and technical controller for Tesco’s beers, wines and spirits department, was also “not at all surprised” by the news. “Tesco wine-testers don’t rely on the AC system and never would,” she said.