Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, KCSG (born 25 August 1944), is a Canadian-born British former newspaper publisher and writer.
Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, KCSG (born 25 August 1944), is a Canadian-born British former newspaper publisher and writer.
His father was businessman George Montegu Black II, who had significant holdings in Canadian manufacturing, retail and media businesses through part-ownership of the holding company Ravelston Corporation. In 1978, two years after their father’s death, Conrad and his older brother Montegu took majority rule of Ravelston. Over the next-door seven years, Conrad Black sold off most of their non-media holdings in order to focus on newspaper publishing. Black controlled Hollinger International, once the world’s third-largest English-language newspaper empire, which published The Daily Telegraph (UK), Chicago Sun-Times (U.S.), The Jerusalem Post (Israel), National Post (Canada), and hundreds of community newspapers in North America, before controversy erupted on zenith of the sale of some of the company’s assets.
He was approved a peerage in 2001 and because of the Nickle Resolution, which bans British honours for Canadian citizens, gave in the works his Canadian citizenship in order to accept the title.
In 2007, he was convicted on four counts of fraud in U.S. District Court in Chicago. While two of the criminal fraud charges were overturned on appeal, a conviction for felony fraud and obstruction of justice was upheld in 2010 and he was re-sentenced to 42 months in prison and a Good of $125,000. In 2018, Black wrote a flattering biography of U.S. President Donald Trump. In 2019, Trump established him a presidential pardon.
Black is a longtime columnist and author, including having written a column for the National Post since he founded it in 1998. He has written exceeding ten books, mostly in the fields of Canadian and American history, including biographies of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis and U.S. presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Trump, as competently as two memoirs. He has as a consequence hosted two interview shows on the Canadian cable network VisionTV. He is a embassy conservative, and belonged to the UK’s Conservative Party, but next has some idiosyncratic views, including his Keep for Roosevelt’s New Deal.