Perle, the kleptocrat
So it seems that Richard Perle, the éminence noire of the current neo-con cabal is, at the heart of it all, just a mundane old kleptocrat after all, not a courageous, idealistic "true believer" in anything?
Okay, maybe he's both.
But as this report in today's WaPo makes clear, there are plenty of his former colleagues on the board of the media conglomerate Hollinger International who now say he was just in it for the money. $5.4 million in bonuses and compensation, to be precise.
Hollinger-- which owns the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and until recently London's right-kookie Daily Telegraph-- was put together and run the originally Canadian (now also British) Likudnik Conrad Black.
Some of the shareholder reps on the Hollinger board commissioned the report after the company nearly went totally belly-up last November.
Perle, also a director of the company, got that $5.4 million in a series of sweetheart deals with Black. WaPo's Frank Ahrens writes that the latest report said, "Perle should return the money."
The whole Conrad Black affair is one that merits a lot of attention. I was certainly aware of how, soon after he bought the JeruPo in, maybe, the late 1980s, it went from being a fair, solidly-reported, and informative newspaper to being much more ideological and much less useful as a news source.
The board of Hollinger International was stuffed with political luminaries like Perle, Henry Kissinger, Richard Burt, etc. Oh, and by an "amazing coincidence" Black's wife, the rabid pro-Likud columnist Barbara Amiel, was also a member.
The latest report on the firm was prepared by Richard C. Breeden, a former SEC chairman and was filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. Ahrens wrote that it:
- added details of what it called the "corporate kleptocracy" Black and [his sidekick] Radler created at Hollinger. It said they treated the company as a "piggybank" and fashion accessory, with Black using the prestige of the newspapers to gain access to the wealthy, powerful and royal.
For example, the report said Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, treated the Hollinger corporate jet as a private shuttle between cities such as Chicago and Toronto and vacation spots. They took frequent trips to Palm Springs and one 33-hour round trip to Bora Bora [??- HC], which cost the company $530,000, the report said. It also said Black charged the company $90,000 to refurbish a Rolls-Royce and used $8 million in company money to buy memorabilia of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, about whom Black wrote a book.
From 1997 to 2003, the report said, Black, Radler and other controlling shareholders steered 95.2 percent of Hollinger's adjusted net income into their personal accounts. Black's Hollinger Inc. has 68 percent voting control of Hollinger International and 18.2 percent equity interest.
"Behind a constant stream of bombast regarding their accomplishments as self-described 'proprietors,' Black and Radler made it their business to line their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise," said the report.... "At Hollinger, Black as both [chief executive] and controlling shareholder, together with his associates, created an entity in which ethical corruption was a defining characteristic of the leadership team."
How true Helena,
Fantastic site, but please ... please ... announce to the world that though he's once again holed up in Toronto that Conrad Black is NOT a Canadian. He renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to become a British Lord. Sometimes we can be saved by 'their' own stupidity.
Do hear ad hominum logic?
In the buildup to the war, a guy named Jamie Rubin was part of a PBS show which appears periodically. The show was all smoke and mirrors, no one identified, but lots of implication of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. At the close of the show, Jamie Rubin interviewed Richard Perle and actually with a straight face asked Perle whether that was the evidence we needed to invade Iraq. Perle of course said yes. I understand that Rubin is married to the CNN int'l reporter and was with the Clinton State Department. I also understand that this same Rubin, now an advisor to Kerry, made the statement that Kerry (attributed to Kerry) probably would have invaded Iraq. Anyone else know some dope on this guy and how he went from Perle pusher to the Kerry campaign. I feel sick.
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