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Conrad Black

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The Right Honourable Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, PC, OC (born August 25, 1944 in Montreal, Quebec), is a Canadian-born British biographer, financier and newspaper magnate. He is the latest in a series of Canadian-born British press lords—his predecessors were Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, and Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet. Black is married to Barbara Amiel, a well-known right-wing columnist.

Through his Ravelston Corporation he has a 82% share-holding in the Toronto-based Hollinger Inc. group which, through Hollinger International, owns or controls several newspapers, notably in the United States, including the Chicago Sun-Times (1994). He also holds 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. In 2004 his Telegraph Group in the United Kingdom 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 U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). Today, Black and his former confederates 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 has been indicted by the US Department of Justice. Black's lieutenant and closest confidante David Radler has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud in the US and is expected to testify against Black whose future and reputation remain clouded pending investigation by the US Justice department and numerous lawsuits filed by Hollinger shareholders.

Early life and career

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. He then attended Trinity College School, the alma mater of his older brother Montegu Black. Lord Black lasted less than a year. He eventually graduated from another private school in Toronto called Thornton Hall. He continued his education at Carleton University (History, 1965) and Laval University (Law, 1970), later completing a master's degree (MA) at McGill University. 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 Catholic convert, is married to Barbara Amiel, who is Jewish, and has a son, James Black, and a daughter, Alana Black.

Conrad Black was taken under the wing of Bud McDougald and E. P. Taylor, two of the most powerful businessmen in Canada. Following the death of McDougald, in 1978 Conrad Black acquired the shares owned by McDougald's widow in Argus Corporation, a mammoth Canadian holding company, whose 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.

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.

Becoming a British press lord

In 1985, Black first entered the UK newspaper business, buying into the Telegraph group. By 1990 his companies ran over 400 newspaper titles in North America. Many of these were disposed of towards 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 1998 but sold his interest in 2001. He gave up the majority of his remaining Canadian media interests in 2001.

Black gave up his Canadian citizenship to become a British life peer because of Canada's Nickle Resolution that called on the monarch (King or Queen) to desist from granting aristocratic titles in Canada. Black had attempted to evade the resolution by taking dual British and Canadian citizenship and seeking the peerage as a Briton, and he unsuccessfully sued the Canadian government in 2001 when this tactic failed.

Prior to his renunciation of citizenship, Black and his supporters had argued that this strict interpretation of the Nickle Resolution by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was payback for Black's past verbal sparrings with Chretien and his (right-wing) political opinions. Despite divesting himself of his citizenship, Black continues to enjoy the privileges of being a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada such as use of a special passport.

Controversies surrounding Black

Black has made several controversial statements, including the suggestions that Canada should join the United States and abandon its universal publicly-funded health care system or medicare. Ironically, Lord Black's scholarly work on Franklin Delano Roosevelt (published in November 2003) clearly shows him as a strong supporter of Roosevelt's liberal New Deal. The Roosevelt biography was met with positive reviews; it came some thirty years after his biography of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, widely considered the definitive work on the man, and written when Black was in his twenties.

On November 17, 2003, it was announced that Black would be resigning as chief executive of Hollinger after an internal inquiry alleged that he had received over $7 million in unauthorized payments of company funds. The SEC had launched an investigation of his company's affairs. On January 17, 2004, Hollinger International reported that the executive committee of the board of directors 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.

On November 15, 2004, the SEC filed civil fraud lawsuits against Lord Black and several others. (BBC)

Black was also involved, albeit tangentially, in a controversy in December of 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 resulting scandal led to Bernard beng reassigned to Algeria the following year.

Earlier, in the 1980s, Black appropriated over $62 million 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.

The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting criticised an incident in which Black paid an American columnist, George Will, $25,000 for a single day of consulting, after which Will wrote favourably about Black without disclosing the payment. [1]

As Black has often been a controversial figure in Canadian life, he has been mercilessly lampooned by the Toronto humour magazine Frank as "Lord Tubby".

References

[2] News release from the Privy Council of Canada on the lawsuit filed against Jean Chretien by Conrad Black

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