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'No one is above the law' - Conrad Black gets six years | Business | The Guardian
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'No one is above the law' - Conrad Black gets six years

Former Telegraph owner jailed for plot to embezzle $6.1m from shareholders

Former newspaper baron Conrad Black leaves the federal building in Chicago after sentencing in his racketeering and fraud trial

Former newspaper baron Conrad Black leaves the federal building in Chicago after sentencing in his racketeering and fraud trial. Photograph: Jerry Lai/AP

Conrad Black was sentenced yesterday to six and a half years in an American prison for abusing shareholders' trust through a sophisticated plot to embezzle $6.1m from his Hollinger media empire.

At Chicago's federal court, Judge Amy St Eve told the former owner of the Daily Telegraph: "No one is immune from the proper application of law in the United States and that, Mr Black, includes you."

As a pale-faced Black stood ramrod straight in front of the bench, the judge said it was essential to the functioning financial markets that directors put their companies first.

In addition to the prison stretch, she fined him $125,000 (£62,000).

"Corporate executives have a duty to act in shareholders' best interests - not in their own selfish interests," she told him.

Black has been given 12 weeks to put his affairs in order and will report to jail at the beginning of March. His lawyers asked for him to serve his sentence at a minimum security prison, Eglin airforce base in Florida. But in an odd twist, the US bureau of prisons in Washington said this facility had been closed since 2006.

After remaining silent throughout his four-month trial, the disgraced press baron delivered a final display of defiance as he accepted an opportunity to address the court. "I do wish to express very profound regret and sadness at the severe hardship inflicted on many shareholders at the evaporation of $1.85bn of value under the management of my successors," said the 63-year-old peer, speaking in a husky yet confident voice.

Prosecutors had asked for a sentence as long as 20 years, citing his lack of remorse and his disdain of the US judicial system - which included describing prosecutors as "Nazis" and "pygmies".

"We have the verdicts we have and we cannot retry this case," Black said. "I would say, however, very emphatically, that I have never uttered one disrespectful word about this court, your honour yourself or the jury."

Arriving at the court in a grey-blue pinstripe suit, Black entered the room with one hand in his pocket. He was watched from the public gallery by his wife, the writer Barbara Amiel, and by his daughter, Alana. The case, in which Black was accused of receiving millions of dollars in bonuses disguised as phoney "non-compete" payments, is part of a pattern of white-collar prosecutions by the US government which arose in the aftermath of the collapse of vast companies such as Enron and WorldCom.

The prosecutor, Eric Sussman, told the court that in some respects Black's actions were worse than those of the bosses of Enron who manipulated books and balance sheets in an effort to keep the company from collapsing from hidden losses. "Mr Black and his colleagues simply stole money," Sussman said. "What put him in here today was his own greed and his own disdain for the rule of law."

More than 100 acquaintances, friends and family members wrote to the judge urging lenience.

Among the pleas was a letter from Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, which praised Black's donations to the Elton John Aids Foundation - although prosecutors pointed out that a £5,000 gift to the charity had, in fact, come from a Telegraph trust rather than from the peer himself.

Jeffrey Steinback, a sentencing consultant hired by Black, described the media mogul as a "historian, an author, a devoted husband and a loving father" who was taking blood pressure pills because of the strain of the trial.

At the beginning of the case, the US government compared Black to a bank robber who used documents and memos, rather than knives and guns, to orchestrate theft.

Rejecting this analogy, Steinback told the court: "As far as I know, no bank robbers have ever personally built the banks they robbed. None have ever received countless glowing reports from their employees."

Black's imprisonment completes a final fall from grace for a man whose personal fortune was once estimated at £136m and who controlled more than 200 newspapers around the globe including the Jerusalem Post and the Chicago Sun-Times as well as Britain's Telegraph titles.


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