Black Eye for Conrad Black

摘要

Conrad black was doing his best last week to promote his just-released book―a massive tome, "Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom," that he penned as a sideline to his day job. But for all his efforts to talk up FDR's New Deal, the only deals people wanted to know about were Black's. The Securities and Exchange Commission has some pointed questions about $15.6 million in unauthorized payments to Black and other top executives of his company, Hollinger, a media empire with newspapers stretching from Chicago and Canada to London and Israel. Those payments came from buyers of newspapers that Black divested between 1999 and 2001, and those millions weren't for the assets―they went directly to Black and other Hollinger brass for guarantees that they wouldn't compete directly with the papers they had just sold.