KEY POINTS:
Prosecutors wrapping up their fraud case against Conrad Black, the fallen newspaper baron, asked the jury yesterday to "expose his cover story for the lie that it is".
After more than three months of sometimes highly technical evidence, the former owner of the Daily Telegraph is just days away from discovering if he faces spending much of the rest of his life in prison.
Black sat stony-faced as US federal attorney Julie Ruder set out how the peer and three fellow accused used bogus clauses in newspaper deals to steal US$60 million ($79.4 million) from the company they ran, and then appealed to the jury to look up from the minutiae of the deals to see the bigger picture.
"We're not here because somebody made a mistake, we're not here because somebody forgot to dot the i's or cross the t's," Ruder said. The men "decided on their own to take a slice of the company's profits".
Black is accused of using Hollinger International as a personal piggy bank to fund a lavish lifestyle - first by getting the company to pay for personal holidays and parties, then by siphoning money through bogus agreements not to compete against newspapers that Hollinger was selling.
Money from those non-compete agreements, the prosecution says, by rights belonged to Hollinger, and Black and his fellow conspirators were defrauding the company's outside shareholders by taking it.
"It's a pretty easy way for people who know how the system works to use it as part of a cover story," Ruder said.
In an echo of Black's own words in an internal email, she added. "Conrad Black fancied himself a proprietor. No sackcloth and ashes for him."
Hollinger was once the third-largest newspaper company in the English-speaking world, with titles including the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph in the UK, the Jerusalem Post, the National Post in Canada and the Chicago Sun-Times in the US, in the city where the trial is being held.
Black and his associates were kicked out in 2004 when shareholders began to ask questions about large sums being taken out of the company, and a shareholder report concluded that Hollinger was being run as a "corporate kleptocracy".
As shareholders closed in, the trial heard, Black wrote an email to associates saying that investors should not be allowed "to force us into a hair shirt, the corporate equivalent of sackcloth and ashes".
Black faces 13 charges. Peter Atkinson and Jack Boultbee, two other Hollinger executives who also shared in millions of dollars from the non-compete agreements, face a smaller number of charges, as does Mark Kipnis, a Hollinger lawyer accused of helping the men with their schemes.
All the men deny the charges, and Black has promised a blizzard of libel lawsuits against his accusers after what he has repeatedly described as his "inevitable" acquittal.
Closing arguments are expected to take up the next few days, and the jury is expected to be handed the case for consideration next week.
In a potential blow to the defence team, the judge, Amy St Eve, has said she will give the jury the "ostrich instruction" - which is that they can still convict Black if they believe he deliberately put his head in the sand and ignored evidence of criminal behaviour at Hollinger.
The defence has argued that any crimes were carried out only by David Radler, the peer's right-hand man for three decades, who testified against him as part of a plea bargain with prosecutors.
Radler admitted one fraud count in return for a lenient 29-month sentence and said that the non-compete agreements had been Black's idea, but the defence team characterised him as a serial liar.
- INDEPENDENT
