Conrad Black

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Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour PC, OC, KCSG, (born 25 August 1944, in Montreal, Quebec), is a British biographer, financier and former newspaper magnate. He is married to Barbara Amiel, a well-known columnist.

Black was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but renounced his citizenship in 2001 in order to become a life peer in the British House of Lords.

He subsequently described his former Canadian citizenship as "an impediment to my progress in another more amenable jurisdiction." He has since sought to regain Canadian citizenship, as of 2006.

With the growth of his business and legal difficulties, since 2003 he is believed to have spent much of his time at his Bridle Path mansion in Toronto, Ontario.

It was reported in the National Post on 18 November 2005, that Black had recently applied for permanent residency status in Canada. If convicted of the serious crimes of which he is accused in the United States, Black might be unable to permanently return to his native Canada, since Canada rarely allows entry to foreign criminals.

Contents

[edit] Early life and career

Conrad Black was born into a wealthy Toronto family. His father, George Montegu Black, Jr., was the president of Canadian Breweries, an international brewing conglomerate. Conrad Black was first educated at Upper Canada College from which he was expelled for selling stolen exams.[citation needed] What led to Black's exposure was that he sold the exams at different prices according to the purchaser's social status.[citation needed]

He then attended Trinity College School, the alma mater of his older brother Montegu Black. Black lasted less than a year.[citation needed] He eventually graduated from another private school in Toronto called Thornton Hall.

He continued his education at Carleton University (History, 1965) and Université Laval (Law, 1970), later completing a master's degree (MA) at McGill University. His thesis, later published, was on right-wing Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis.

He became involved in a number of businesses, mainly newspapers, but including mining and publishing.

His family founded the Ravelston Corporation in 1969 as an investment vehicle. Together with friends, David Radler and Peter G. White, Black purchased and operated the Sherbrooke Record, the small English daily in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

In 1971, the three formed Sterling Newspapers Limited, a holding company that would acquire several other small newspapers.

Black, a Roman Catholic convert,[citation needed] is married to Barbara Amiel, who is Jewish, and he has two sons, Jonathan-David and James Patrick Leonard Black, and a daughter, Alana Whitney Elizabeth Black, from a previous marriage to Joanna Hishon, of Montreal.

Conrad Black was taken under the wing of Bud McDougald and E. P. Taylor, two of the most powerful businessmen in Canada.[citation needed]

Following the death of McDougald, in 1978 Conrad Black acquired the shares owned by McDougald's widow of Argus Corporation, a mammoth Canadian holding company.

Argus' holdings at the time Black took it over included some of Canada's finest blue-chip companies such as Dominion Stores, Canada's largest supermarket chain, Massey Ferguson, Canada's large multi-national farm machinery corporation, Hollinger Mines, an important gold-mining company in Timmins, Ontario, and Norcen Energy, an energy and pipeline operation.

His record in managing these operations is deemed by most financial experts as less than successful.[citation needed]

In 1990, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He was ranked 235th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2004, with an estimated wealth of £175m.

[edit] Becoming a press baron

Black was the latest in a series of Canadian-born British press lords—his predecessors include Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook; Hugh Graham, 1st Baron Atholstan; and Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet.

In 1985, Black was approached by Andrew Knight, (then the editor of The Economist), and invited to finance a take-over of the ailing Telegraph group. By buying into the Telegraph group, Black made his entry into the British press.

By 1990, his companies ran over 400 newspaper titles in North America. Many of these were disposed of toward the end of the 1990s with around 150 titles being sold in a single deal with CanWest Global Communications Corp.

He launched the National Post in Toronto in 1998 but sold his interest in 2001. He gave up the majority of his remaining Canadian media interests in 2001.

Through his Ravelston Corporation he had an 82-per-cent share-holding in the Toronto-based Hollinger Inc. group which, through Hollinger International, owned or controlled several newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times (1994).

He also held a minority interest in the New York Sun (2002). Hollinger once owned a large number of Canadian newspapers, accounting for a plurality of that country's daily newspaper circulation, and acquired and relaunched the Financial Post as a section of the National Post (1998), in large part to get a foothold in the competitive Toronto newspaper market.

Until his media empire came crashing down, he also owned Israel's Jerusalem Post, turning its editorial outlook from centrist to right-wing [citation needed].

In 2004, his Telegraph Group was sold to David and Frederick Barclay, after the accounting practices of Black and his board came under intense scrutiny by Hollinger shareholders and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Today, Black and his former associates have been removed from the boards of Hollinger International and Hollinger Inc., his Ravelston Corporation is under court protection against its creditors in Canada, and he has been indicted by the United States Department of Justice.

Black's lieutenant and closest confidante, David Radler, has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud in the United States and is expected to testify against Black, whose future and reputation remain clouded pending investigation by the U. S. Justice Department and numerous lawsuits filed by Hollinger shareholders.

[edit] The peerage controversy and Canadian citizenship

Black's initial attempt to accept the British peerage offered to him by the Queen on the advice of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was thwarted by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who referred to the 1919 Nickle Resolution, by which the Canadian House of Commons resolved that the Canadian Monarch should not confer titular honours on Canadians.

Black attempted to work around the Canadian Prime Minister by taking dual British and Canadian citizenship, claiming that he would accept the peerage from the Queen as a British citizen rather than as a Canadian citizen. After his tactic proved unsuccessful, with Chrétien still asserting that Blair could not have the Queen give a titular honour to a Canadian, Black initiated a lawsuit against Chrétien, arguing that the Canadian Prime Minister's strict interpretation of the Nickle Resolution, which is not a law, was payback for Black's political opinions and past criticism of Chrétien.

Black lost the lawsuit on the first instance and on appeal, with the court stating that the Prime Minister of Canada was within his constitutional rights to advise the Queen on the exercise of her royal prerogative.[1] In 2001, Black gave up his Canadian citizenship and became Baron Black of Crossharbour in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

Even without his Canadian citizenship, Black continues to enjoy the privileges of membership in the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, including the use of a special passport.

Then on September 26, 2006, the Globe and Mail reported that Black was taking steps to regain his Canadian citizenship. Lord Black, in an interview on TVOntario, on September 25, claimed that his legal problems had retarded the process by which he would reclaim his citizenship.; "I always said that I would take my citizenship back, and if it wasn't for all these legal problems, I would have done it by now." He told interviewer Steve Paikin that he was working through "normal channels."

Black would be able to retain his seat in the British House of Lords should he regain his Canadian citizenship, a process that might take several years.

Lord Black said that he did not have an "easy sleigh ride" when he was a Canadian, but said that he has become more patriotic and something of a "demonstrative Canadian flag waver." He also said his admiration for the United States has declined since being hit by his legal troubles as the U.S. is a very tough country that respects only winners.

[edit] Financial controversies

In the 1980s, Black appropriated over $62,000,000 from the Dominion workers' pension fund, over the opposition of his employees, before divesting himself of the grocery store chain.

Indeed, many of his critics have pointed out that most, if not all, of his acquisitions had been financed by money belonging to shareholders or employees rather than by the risk of his own funds. He does not dispute this and noted that he made his early purchases of brokerages and newspapers by borrowing half the money from a bank and the other half from the seller. [citation needed]

On 17 November 2003, after an internal inquiry alleged that Black had received more than $7 million in unauthorized payments of company funds, it was announced that he would resign as chief executive of Hollinger. The SEC also launched an investigation of his company's affairs.

On 17 January 2004, Hollinger International reported that the executive committee of the board of directors had obtained Black's resignation as chairman. At the same time the special committee in Hollinger already investigating the unauthorised payments filed a lawsuit in New York for the recovery of the money.

Hollinger International also filed a $200 million (USD) lawsuit against Lord Black and his former top lieutenant, David Radler, as well as the companies Black has used to control the publishing it. [citation needed]

On 15 November 2004, the SEC filed civil fraud lawsuits against Lord Black and several others. [2]

On 17 November 2005, eleven criminal fraud charges were brought by U. S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald against Black and three former Hollinger executives. Eight of the criminal fraud charges are against Black, and a warrant has been issued for his arrest.

On 15 December 2005, four new federal charges were laid against Black by Fitzgerald in Chicago. The new counts include racketeering, obstruction of justice, money laundering and wire fraud. Under the racketeering count, Fitzgerald is seeking forfeiture of more than $92,000,000 (USD).

The obstruction count against Black relates to a video that appears to show Black illegally removing more than a dozen boxes from the Toronto office of Hollinger Inc. (see[3]).

[edit] Other controversies surrounding Black

Black has made several controversial statements, including the suggestions that Canada should join the United States and abandon its universal health care system, Medicare.

Black was also involved, albeit tangentially, in a controversy in December 2001, when the then-French ambassador to the UK, Daniel Bernard, called Israel a "shitty little country" in a conversation the two had at a private dinner party. The conversation was promptly reported by Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, in her newspaper column. The resulting scandal led to Bernard's being reassigned to Algeria the following year.

The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting criticised an incident in which Black paid the erudite and conservative American columnist George Will $25,000 for a single day of consulting, after which Will wrote favourably about Black without disclosing the payment. [4]

Black has been lampooned by the Canadian humour magazine Frank as "Lord Tubby."

Black was the subject of the 2004 documentary film Citizen Black which premiered at the Montreal and Cambridge film festivals.

[edit] Interest in Franklin D. Roosevelt

Using funds from Hollinger International, Conrad Black purchased at auction a collection of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's private papers. With the assistance of his wife (conservative political columnist Barbara Amiel) and other American conservative writers, he produced a bestselling 1,280-page biography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom, in 2003.

The book relies heavily upon the information in the FDR collection he owns, emphasizing small, sometimes very personal details of FDR's life.

The book maintains that FDR was neither the guileless, patrician altruist that his admirers would like to portray, nor the dupe for Stalin at Yalta that his opponents portray. Rather, FDR is portrayed as a mysterious and complex individual who was able to marshall the forces that saved the United States from the Great Depression and the world from totalitarianism in World War II. [citation needed]

As a young man Black also wrote a book about Quebec's controversial longest serving premier, Maurice Duplessis. Duplessis, who died in office in 1959, had been regarded by Canadian historians and journalists as a reactionary authoritarian; Black defended him as a canny progressive force.

[edit] A controversial biography

Tom Bower's dual biography Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge (ISBN-13 978-0-00-723234-5) was published by Harper Collins in November 2006. The book paints a negative picture of the couple (extract) and has been dismissed by Black. [5]

[edit] References

  • [6] Guardian Unlimited Special Report - Conrad Black, Hollinger and the Telegraph - Ongoing archive collection of news and analysis.
  • [7] SEC - Breeden Report - Complete 512-page copy of the Report of Investigation by the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Hollinger International Inc.
  • [8] - Black fired, faces $200M lawsuit. In 2004 Black faced a number of law suits from investors and others claiming highly inappropriate financial dealings as well as audit fraud concerning circulation at his papers.
  • Devin Leonard. "Black & Blue: Shareholders are beating up Hollinger CEO Conrad Black over his huge, tricky pay packages. He calls them 'governance terrorists'". Fortune. 29 September 2003.
  • [9]) - News release from the Privy Council of Canada on the lawsuit filed against Jean Chrétien by Conrad Black.

[edit] External links

Preceded by:
New Creation		 Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour 2001-present Followed by:
incumbent - title will expire with the death of the holder
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../c/o/n/Conrad_Black_cc0c.html"
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