Yesterday, the imperial name of Lord Conrad Black of Hollinger International Inc. was added to the rogues gallery of corporate crooks – which includes Ken Lay of Enron, Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom, Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco and the Rigas family of Aldelphia Communications – that will be recorded in the annals of history as royalty amongst thieves.
Oddly enough, this should provide Lord Black some consolation considering that he himself is an acclaimed historian (having written a definitive biography of FDR) and a man so covetous of the effluvia of British royalty that he renounced his Canadian citizenship to be granted a “life peer” by HM The Queen. (A dubious honour, it is alleged, that he earned only after misappropriating millions of shareholder dollars to fund British charities and royal dinner parties.)
No couple personified the pomposity and debauchery of the idle rich than Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel – who once infamously told the editor of Vogue “I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.”
Given the litany of criminal fraud charges alleged against him, however, Lord Black seems to have been born to this rogues gallery of royal thieves. Because the greedy acquisition and ostentatious flaunting of his ill-gotten gains (abetted regally by his criminally spendthrift wife) were of such egregious magnitude that they would shame even the man whose shameless excesses incited the French revolution, King Louis XVI (abetted by his equally self-indulgent wife, Marie Antoinette).
But as far as this royal poseur is concerned, he is already suffering the harshest punishment imaginable: banishment from favour with the royal family and stricken from the social registers of New York City and Palm Beach!
News and Politics
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Anonymous says
LOL: I take it you’re an unabashed republican! Welcome. Great ribbing!
Jeremy