Four Curiosities

These trial-related items, of which two are on the vindication side, are not news reports, nor are they current, but they do show facets of either Conrad Black or the corporate-governance movement:

1. A repost of an early Mark Steyn blog entry that asks a question I've not seen a recent reference to, as of yet: those non-compete agreements were passed to the Federal Trade Commission, which okayed them. This fact may surface after the prosecution rests.

2. The Financial Times has a special Conrad Black in Depth webpage, for its occasional stories on the progress of the trial. Near the bottom is a column by Gideon Radman, entitled "Conrad Black and the Decline of the Anglosphere," and a cordial reply by Conrad Black himself.

3. A January 24th column by Liz Smith, entitled "THE LORD'S RIGHT," is a review of Tom Bower's book, Conrad & Lady Black. Ms. Smith's review ends with the only personal experience she has had socializing with him, and the anecdote itself ends with the paragraph just before the one that holds this final sentence: "It's a knockout recital of white-collar crime, stubborn blindness, and North Americans stupidly exhibiting outrageous droit de seigneur."

4. A critique of corporate-governance law by Alykhan Velshi, who sizes it up as politicized. He has four criticisms to offer: one, the push for "minority shareholder rights" seems to be a lobby effort by institutional investors, who took full litigative advantage until a glass ceiling was imposed upon "strike suits" by Congress; two, the zealotry surrounding it has ("yet again," I add laconically) resulted in criminalizing technical infractions and consigning the rule of proportionality to the flotsam pile; three, it has amplified the government's use of forefeiture to muscle defendants; and four, it has fomented a general landing-on of people who are both successful and flashy, at the hazard of sometimes draining the flashiness out of companies they control to the detriment of their value. A fascinating read, even though it is confined merely to the litigiousness in the movement, and does not encompass the corporate-governance movement as a whole.