Supreme Court ruling raises hope for Black

Imprisoned press baron Conrad Black has been given a sliver of hope in his long and belligerent campaign to clear his name after the US Supreme Court ruled that the jury that convicted him of fraud was given faulty instructions.

The same ruling also re-opens the case of Jeff Skilling, the chief executive of the bankrupt energy company Enron, and is likely to make it much harder for US prosecutors to secure convictions for white-collar crime and political corruption.

Black, 65, was once a pillar of the conservative establishment, the former owner of the Daily Telegraph who renounced his Canadian citizenship to become Lord Black of Crossharbour in the House of Lords, but who is now serving 6 years in a US jail.

In 2007, a Chicago jury decided that he and senior colleagues illegally siphoned off US$6.1 million by inserting bogus clauses into deals by his Hollinger International newspaper conglomerate.

The convictions were upheld on appeal and Black failed to get a pardon from departing US president George Bush, as he had hoped.

Enron, meanwhile, has become a byword for corporate corruption. The company collapsed under the weight of its hidden debts in 2001.

Now, though, both Black and Skilling will have parts of their cases reheard by appeals court judges, raising the prospect that they could be released from jail earlier than expected.

The Supreme Court ruling does not refer to all of the charges against the two men: Black was also charged with obstructing justice after being caught on CCTV loading boxes of company documents into the back of his limo in contravention of a regulator's order; Skilling, 56, was convicted on a total of 19 charges and is serving a 24-year sentence.

Black called the case against him "monstrous defamations" and he has protested his innocence in newspaper columns since he went to prison.

The Supreme Court ruling hinges on a 28-word law enacted by Congress in 1988, which says corporate bosses have a duty to provide their companies with "honest services", and that not doing so amounts to fraud.

Reporting the majority verdict of the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that the law should only apply when executives took bribes.

"Because Skilling's misconduct entailed no bribe or kickback, he did not conspire to commit honest-services fraud under our confined construction" of the law, she wrote.

The same is true of Black and his co-accused underlings, Mark Kipnis, Jack Boultbee and Peter Atkinson.

The ruling could have wide implications for securing convictions against corporate executives and politicians accused of abusing their power. The US Government had argued that the "honest services" provision should be interpreted more broadly.

- INDEPENDENT