Posted on 12/30/2003 7:06:11 AM PST by Liz
Dark times surround Conrad Black, business newsmaker of the year
TORONTO (CP) - His biggest news may still lie ahead of him, but Conrad Black has been anointed by newspaper and broadcast editors as the first notable to be named The Canadian Press business newsmaker of the year.
Unfortunately for the hard-pressed media magnate who for a time dealt with Canadian newspapers like Monopoly-game properties, the honour carries no cash - and no "get out of jail free" card.
Black, 59, dominated voting for business newsmaker of 2003 in a survey of newspaper editors and broadcasters by CP and Broadcast News.
He was named by 29 of the 61 editors who voted for a business newsmaker, a new category in the annual year-end poll by the national newsgathering co-operative and its broadcast subsidiary.
Fewer than half as many votes - 14 - went to runner-up Robert Milton, chief executive of insolvent Air Canada, while Bank of Canada governor David Dodge was a distant third with four.
"Even a hint that Conrad may have been caught with his hands in the cookie jar inspired interest though he is no longer Canadian (by his own choice) - in fact, that's probably partly what made many people relish this story," commented John Halucha, editor of the Sault Ste. Marie (Ont.) Star. in northern Ontario.
For Black the businessman, 2003 was, to use a phrase popularized by the Queen, an annus horribilis.
Long-simmering shareholder unrest erupted in May, and the year just kept getting horribler, right up to the Monday before Christmas when Black invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a session with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The regulator was examining millions of dollars in Hollinger group payments to Black and his associates that were made without proper approval.
However, 2003 was a more gratifying year for Black as an intellectual and author.
While his Hollinger international newspaper enterprise was beset by outraged stockholders and nosy regulators, book reviewers hailed his 1,296-page biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"Conrad Black's life of Franklin Roosevelt is a great achievement, and all the more welcome for being more than a little surprising," The Economist said in a notice typical of the book's reception.
"Given the recent troubles within Lord Black's Hollinger business empire, one wonders how he found the time to write so long and so knowledgeable a book."
Shareholders in the Hollinger group were wondering the same thing.
They also wondered why FDR documents were bought with money from Hollinger International, the operating company centred on the Telegraph group of London-based conservative newspapers - grabbed by Black in a classic buy-low raid in 1986 that installed him in British high society.
Other Hollinger International holdings include the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post.
Despite a pledge in May to relinquish his domination and his "retirement" in November as CEO of Hollinger International, Black controls it all through multiple-voting shares owned by Toronto holding company Hollinger Inc., in turn controlled by Black's private Ravelston Corp.
Shareholders also are wondering about $32 million US in dubious payments from Hollinger International to Black and his associates, and about a variety of other apparent excesses ranging from two corporate jets to six-figure yearly maintenance costs on a Manhattan apartment.
The Hollinger empire, which began in the 1960s with a clapped-out mine company and some bedraggled small-city newspapers, grew to own more than half of Canada's dailies by 1998, when Black started the National Post, aspiring to "stimulate a slightly higher level of debate of public affairs."
Most of the Canadian assets were bought in 2000 for $3.2 billion by CanWest Global Communications, which sued in December for $25 million over aspects of the National Post transfer.
In May 2001, Black renounced his Canadian citizenship to claim a British peerage that Prime Minister Jean Chretien had blocked.
As Lord Black of Crossharbour, he and his second wife, columnist Barbara Amiel, lived a life of conspicuous consumption including sumptuous mansions in London, Toronto and Palm Beach, Fla., and fashion-magazine layouts of Lady Black's wardrobe.
"I think his marriage to Barbara really changed him," said Peter C. Newman, author of The Establishment Man, a biography of Black published in 1982 when its subject was still in his 30s.
"He likes nice things, but he'd never been this excessive. . . . He doesn't have billions - he has millions, but it takes a lot to keep these luxuries going," Newman noted.
"The whole title thing was so stupid. I thought he was better than that," Newman added.
"And I feel sorry, because as a kind of Boswell to the Canadian establishment I always picked him as the hope for the future."
Another Black biographer, Richard Siklos, suggested that "sometime around the time that he left Canada and became a peer, that seems to be the time at which his sort of carefully constructed life seemed to start to unravel."
Black, who continued to rage all year against "corporate governance zealots," was trapped in changing times after the scandals at Enron, WorldCom and others, says Siklos, author of Shades of Black.
"He always seemed to approach business from a kind of a chess-player strategic point of view, with an eye on sort of what the grey areas are and how he can take advantage of them. . . . Now the world has changed."
Still, Black has been down before. In the mid-1980s, CIBC, where he was and remains a member of the board, called a $40-million loan to Dominion Stores and the courts ordered the return of $60 million to the shaky supermarket chain's pension funds. Black also was subjected to a probe of his dealings and there were rumours of impending bankruptcy.
"I urge you, no matter how addicted you are to representing me as having been shamed, disgraced and chased out as a scoundrel, to contemplate the possibility that there's just a chance that I might be innocent," he told reporters in November after the Hollinger financial scandal erupted.
"As time will prove, I am."
Whatever the coming year's developments in his "Life in Progress" - to use the title of his 1993 autobiography - Black will continue to polarize feelings.
"Those who like him admire the fact that he's the kind of person who just does whatever the heck he wants and damn the torpedoes, and has managed to come out on top for a time," Siklos observed.
"And those who dislike him, dislike him for the very same reasons."
Born: Aug. 25, 1944, in Montreal.
Education: Attended Upper Canada College in Toronto; expelled for selling exam questions. Studied at Carleton, Laval and McGill universities.
Business: Currently chairman and chief executive of Hollinger Inc. and chairman of its primary operating company Hollinger International of Chicago. Resigned as Hollinger International's CEO in November after an internal investigation by that company's board discovered $32.2 million US in fees had been paid to Black, three other Hollinger executives and Hollinger Inc. without full board authorization. The payments are currently under investigation by U.S. and Canadian regulators.
Author: In 1977, wrote a book about former Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. In 1993, he released 516-page autobiography, A Life In Progress. Recently wrote and published Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, a biography of the American president who governed through the final years of the Depression and Second World War.
Personal: Married to newspaper and magazine columnist Barbara Amiel. Became Lord Black of Crossharbour in 2001 after renouncing his Canadian citizenship to become a member of the British House of Lords.
Quote: "I'm not trying to steal anybody's money. As soon as I heard about it I said right away we had to pay the money back." - Black told a crush of reporters at a book-signing event at a downtown Toronto Indigo book store Nov. 18
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Comments by and about newspaper magnate Conrad Black, business newsmaker of the year:
- "Who do you think turned the Daily Telegraph and the Chicago Sun-Times from insolvent properties to market leaders? Who do you think did that? Corporate-governance advocates?" - Black.
-"He's clearly in serious trouble and unlikely to retain control of the company he built, which is an incredible tragedy for him. But whether he's going to be charged and/or convicted of some kind of crime, I think it's far too early to say." - Richard Siklos, author of Shades of Black, a 1996 biography.
-"I think hubris is a good word to apply to it, because he did build a rather strong newspaper empire and sold it at the height of the market. . . . The source of his current problems is that he tried to finesse the deal a bit too much." - John Miller, professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto
-"I've given new meaning to the term struggling author." - Black, besieged by reporters during a tour to promote his new biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
-"It is scrupulously objective and coldly unsparing of agenda-ridden earlier biographers and historians. It leaps to the head of the class of Rooseveltian lives and will be difficult to supersede." - Publishers Weekly reviews Black's 1,296-page Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom.
-" 'The deferences and preferments that this culture bestows upon the owners of great newspapers are satisfying.' So confided Conrad Black, later ennobled as Lord Black of Crossharbour, to his first editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings. . . . Perhaps if Lord Black had been less smugly satisfied with the 'deferences and preferments' that came with the Telegraph, he might have applied himself to running his business a little better." - The Economist.
-"He operates in the grey areas. In so many instances, there's his version of what happened and everyone else's version." - Richard Siklos.
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