Conrad Black given fresh hope of early release after US supreme court ruling
The disgraced former Telegraph owner Conrad Black and the Enron fraudster Jeffrey Skilling have won fresh hope of early release from jail following a US supreme court ruling that their convictions partly relied on a controversial corruption law that was too broad in its scope.
In a major legal victory for the two jailed tycoons, America's top court issued separate, but related, rulings declaring that the men were treated unfairly when appeal court judges threw out their attempts to overturn their convictions.
However, the rulings shed doubt only on certain aspects of the men's multiple convictions and stop well short of acquittal.
Black, currently an inmate at Florida's Coleman prison, was sentenced in 2007 to six and a half years for defrauding shareholders in his Hollinger media empire out of $6.1m (£3.7m) by attaching a "non-compete" clauses to the sale of newspaper businesses that siphoned off funds from investors. The Canadian-born peer was stripped of the Conservative whip following his conviction. He has vigorously protested his innocence from the beginning....
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
In a major legal victory for the two jailed tycoons, America's top court issued separate, but related, rulings declaring that the men were treated unfairly when appeal court judges threw out their attempts to overturn their convictions.
However, the rulings shed doubt only on certain aspects of the men's multiple convictions and stop well short of acquittal.
Black, currently an inmate at Florida's Coleman prison, was sentenced in 2007 to six and a half years for defrauding shareholders in his Hollinger media empire out of $6.1m (£3.7m) by attaching a "non-compete" clauses to the sale of newspaper businesses that siphoned off funds from investors. The Canadian-born peer was stripped of the Conservative whip following his conviction. He has vigorously protested his innocence from the beginning....