Conrad Black found guilty

[rob_just_rob]

Not on all charges, but on some, including the obstruction of justice charge that carries a maximum 20-year term. :biggrin1:

I guess giving up Canadian citizenship* wasn't such a good idea after all. :tongue:





* relevant because he would likely not have to serve out the full sentence, had he requested a transfer to a Canadian prison.

 

[burns1de]

Not on all charges, but on some, including the obstruction of justice charge that carries a maximum 20-year term. :biggrin1:

I guess giving up Canadian citizenship* wasn't such a good idea after all. :tongue:





* relevant because he would likely not have to serve out the full sentence, had he requested a transfer to a Canadian prison.

Yes!!! Justice is served, finally (partially, at least). Oh, I'm sure his black, black heart will enjoy the not-so-highbrow life inside a jail cell. Good fucking riddance. If they could throw away the key, too, that would be just fine to me.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

Well, now the appeals can begin.
I hope he isn't sentenced to too long a jail term.
In a way, he was victim of a (necessary and overdue) shift in values.
He always played the line, and I'm not surprised if, strictly speaking, he did occasionally overstep himself.
Certainly, there was one case in which he oversaw the sale of a newspaper to Horizon Publishers, and he got a non-compete bonus for himself as a result.
This meant that he couldn't enter that market and pose a threat to Horizon for some agreed-upon period of time.
But who owned Horizon?
Why, none other than one Conrad Moffat Black ... a fact not, I don't believe, properly made apparent to members of the Hollinger board.
So he paid himself to not compete with himself. Which in itself makes no sense. And worse, his pocket filled with money from all the Hollinger shareholders whose interests he was supposedly defending.
Not kewl.

 

[rob_just_rob]

The lawyer for one of the co-defendants claimed that the prosecution had suffered a defeat due to the "not guilty" on RICO charges.

Still, maximum possible sentence of 35 years ought to be enough.

And yes, SR, there will be appeals. And at the end of them, there will be jail. Savour them, the way we did with Ebbers, Kozlowski, and the Enron crew. :biggrin:

 

[rawbone8]

Not on all charges, but on some, including the obstruction of justice charge that carries a maximum 20-year term. :biggrin1:

I guess giving up Canadian citizenship* wasn't such a good idea after all. :tongue:





* relevant because he would likely not have to serve out the full sentence, had he requested a transfer to a Canadian prison.

It shows where hubris can lead. I'm sure Jean Chretien is having a laugh and a giggle at the eventual result of their tussle over Black's relentless pursuit of his title and seat in the British House of Lords and the fact that Jean thwarted the enterprise as Prime Minister. That indirectly led to the Black Knight being pwned now in citzenship chess.

Don' mess wid dat liddle guy from Shawinigan! :biggrin1:


How smart can this guy be that he would allow himself to be filmed on security video removing cartons (presumably records and files of papers?) from the office premises and loading them into a waiting limousine whilst under an Ontario court order not to do so?


I once read a rumour that Conrad, as a little boy, used to wash his banknotes and hang them up on a line to dry. That was in his spare time, when he wasn't playing with his extensive Napoleonic toy army formations.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

And yes, SR, there will be appeals. And at the end of them, there will be jail. Savour them, the way we did with Ebbers, Kozlowski, and the Enron crew. :biggrin:

To a degree, I will, rob. But I don't really think his malfeasance, such as it is, has put him in quite the league of Ebbers, et. al.

It shows where hubris can lead. I'm sure Jean Chretien is having a laugh and a giggle at the eventual result of their tussle over Black's relentless pursuit of his title and seat in the British House of Lords and the fact that Jean thwarted the enterprise as Prime Minister.

Yup. Jean will be having a hoot. And it's hubris that makes so many delighted about how things are turning for Black.

How smart can this guy be that he would allow himself to be filmed on security video removing cartons (presumably records and files of papers?) from the office premises and loading them into a waiting limousine whilst under an Ontario court order not to do so?

Well, it was a dumb thing to do. But Black is smart. Did you read any part of the Roosevelt bio? Very well done.

You know, Black has, as you probably know, a wonderful memory. He was once demonstrating his extraordinary command of where all Allied ships were at various times during the Second World War, and for some reason a date became significant in the conversation. A naval veteran wondered where his ship had been that particular date. Black asked him the name of his ship, thought for a moment, and then said, "You must have been at Gibraltar." And he was right.

Phenomenal.

Another time, his father's boss, industrialist E.P. Taylor, had just come back from North Carolina and dropped into the Black mansion.
When talking about his trip, he asked Conrad, who was then 12, "Conrad, where do you think North Carolina ranks among the American states in terms of population?" Conrad looked at him for a second and then said, "Fourteenth."

Taylor was taken aback, of course. "Conrad," he said, "if you can prove that, I have a quarter here for you." (Obviously Taylor hadn't achieved his wealth by squandering money.)

So Conrad went upstairs, found an almanac, and came down and proved he'd been right.

Taylor, bless his flinty lil' heart, handed over the promised quarter.

I once read a rumour that Conrad, as a little boy, used to wash his banknotes and hang them up on a line to dry. That was in his spare time, when he wasn't playing with his extensive Napoleonic toy army formations.

Yes, and in his teen years, his favourite recording was a speech delivered sonorously by FDR at Madison Square Gardens.

No Elvis for Conrad.

Pity, we could all now agree.:tongue:

 

[rawbone8]

Well, it was a dumb thing to do. But Black is smart. Did you read any part of the Roosevelt bio? Very well done.

I know he is damn smart. Brilliant. Formidable.

The removal video hurt him more than anything else. Looks like red hands to others.

I've not read his work except for a short excerpt on a Richard Nixon bio. It was OK.

He makes for pretty pithy and florid quotes when he speaks. Does he rein in his style when he writes long works like FDR?

When all is said and done, if his appeals fail, maybe he can broker a deal for 10 years on Elba.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

I've not read his work except for a short excerpt on a Richard Nixon bio. It was OK.

His problem there is that no one is willing to take the quite sympathetic view he takes of Nixon. Our beliefs are too deeply patterned. (Personally, I think Conrad's take is pretty good in this case, though I'm not particularly a fan of Nixon's. Nixon had a very dark side to his character, but he had real strengths as well and did several great things, which can't be said of every president. Conrad's sympathy may or may not be excessive, but he may help common opinion find a more just centre.)

He makes for pretty pithy and florid quotes when he speaks. Does he rein in his style when he writes long works like FDR?

I think he does. But of course, what seems florid in speech can seem much more ordinary in print. So if he's equally florid in both, the trait is less annoying on the page.

When all is said and done, if his appeals fail, maybe he can broker a deal for 10 years on Elba.

He's already chanting, "Able was I ere I saw Elba."

 

[kalipygian]

I wonder what a tory does to get a Labour PM to propose him for a life peerage? Not very much to Blair's credit.
A papal order is of course an expression of appreciation for a major contribution, there is no public accounting.

 

[stretcher74]

Conrad may have given up his Canadian citizenship but he'll always be petty-aristocrat Canadian in my book. He's a throwback to the family compact and all that is petty and sordid about canadian business history, attitude and values.

Conrad isn't going to jail because he stretches the law, breaks the law or steals from shareholders. Steve Jobs wrote his own options and backdated them to a tune of a billion dollars in direct theft from shareholders for goodness sake.

Conrad Black is going to jail because he's a fat pig that isn't content to make a killing but has to compulsively keep stealing and cheating at all times everywhere. He steals big, which is smart(in a machivallean sense) but then keeps stealing small because of force of habit/compulsion. He steals untill he gets caught and even then he steals more untill it is so outrageous the authorities have to do something.

Never as rich as claimed, the stealing goes on partly to fuel his own sense of grandiosity, and a certian 75-100M a year eastern european whore of whores.

Now, don't get me wrong, I agree he(and AmielWhore) are both very learned. But learned, unimaginably arrogant and mean-nasty.

I actually feel a lot more sympathy for Bernie Ebbers, even if the money involved was a lot greater. Bernie was a (Canadian) former P.E teacher living in a rural state with a dream that ended up as the worlds largest telecommunications and internet data company (for a time). I can understand that going a little to ones head. Little lies fed bigger and bigger lies told to protect the earlier lies, and eventuallly somebody had to admit that the emperor had no clothes. (In the end about $3Billion in phone bills they had just left off their income statement)

 

[chico8]

So, the moral is: Don't trust a Canadian in a position of power. Or?????

I hope Black gets at least 10 years. He's a slimy, manipulative prick whose only interest is the size of his own ego.

Actually it's too bad that murdoch is more power hungry, than he is hungry for the trappings of his betters. I'd do most anything to be spared his lower class take on politics and power. It's sickening really. Oh, well, he doesn't have much longer and neither his wife nor his offspring seem to be the tyrant he is, so there is hope.

 

[Pumblechook]

Whooooooooooooooooo?

Was my initial thought on this topic. I think I've seen the name before, but I had to look it up to get any idea of details... which I'm still not sure on.

However, I found the following on his wikipedia bio/story which may be interesting to anyone who thought of letting him even have a chance at doing whatever he did in the present time:

"In the 1980s, Black reclaimed $62,000,000 from the surplus of the Dominion workers' pension fund, claiming the surplus was the property of the employer. The Union challenged Black in court and he was ordered to return the money to the workers. Black appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada which upheld the lower court's decision."

He already had attempted theivery/laundering/racketeering -ish things in the past, just hadn't been successful. So who should really be stunned that it happened again 20 years later?

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

"In the 1980s, Black reclaimed $62,000,000 from the surplus of the Dominion workers' pension fund, claiming the surplus was the property of the employer. The Union challenged Black in court and he was ordered to return the money to the workers. Black appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada which upheld the lower court's decision."

He already had attempted theivery/laundering/racketeering -ish things in the past, just hadn't been successful. So who should really be stunned that it happened again 20 years later?

Well, what Black did wasn't nice, his eye, as always, being only on his own interests.
But Black actually was allowed to keep $6 million of the $62 million, which was no bad day's work.
And the principle he was trying to assert has since become generally recognized -- that a company tasked with making up the shortfall when a fund falls below a certain level may, in certain cases, fairly draw out the overage when that level is exceeded.
If he did that now, no eye brows would be raised.
But it was classic Black, who made no bones about his love affair with the big chance.
He once said, "Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated – unfairly so, in my opinion."
Considering his recent misadventures in Chicago, what he went on to add has, with due genuflection to the appeals process, an ironic ring: "There is nothing wrong with avarice as a motive, as long as it doesn't lead to dishonest or anti-social conduct."

 

[chavous]

Who Is Conrad Black?

 

[mindseye]

Long story, but Wikipedia is your friend in cases like these. Think of a Canadian Ken Lay -- unscrupulous business tycoon whose greed led him to rob from the pensions of his own employees.

Technically, he's not even Canadian any more, since he renounced his citizenship in an earlier drama...