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Mail Diary: Cult figures in football chief's books
Mail On Sunday, 26 July 1998
From chriso@lutefisk.demon.co.uk Mon Feb 1 17:42:39 GMT 1999 ---------- RICHER by £174 million from the sale last week of his 67 per cent investment in Hurst Publishing, the company behind Auto Trader magazine which he founded 22 years ago, John Madejski retains his links with the printing group Goodhead. Currently in Kuala Lumpur, bachelor John, 56, is chairman and chief executive of the £18.2 million Oxfordshire company. It has been involved with the controversial Church of Scientology, which charges around £150,000 for a full course of 'enlightenment'. 'We have printed some stuff in the past for the Scientologists, purely on commercial terms, and, yes, we have been paid, ' I am told by Goodhead. 'As far as I know, none of us is involved in Scientology.' The church's British base is in East Grinstead, Sussex. Hollywood followers include John Travolta and Tom Cruise. Scientology is banned in Germany, where Chancellor Helmut Kohl believes it is a sinister sect. His spokesman says: 'They're not a church. They're a form of political extremism.' Its founder, L Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, once boasted: 'If a man wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start a religion.' Born in Stoke-on-Trent, John lives in a mock Tudor mansion in Berkshire and is chairman of Reading Football Club. When his home was burgled in 1995, Madejski revealed: 'All they took was a pair of my Valentino jeans.
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