Media Roundup: Geared Down

The media reports, webbed overnight and this morning, on the Conrad Black trial are dwindling now that the evidentiary part is over. The main story was the restriction of count 10 as laid on Jack Boultbee, although feature reports are beginning to make their appearance:

1. The Washington Post has a profile of Richard Breeden's current activity - that being the running of a hedge fund, Breeden Capital. This fund is new but big, managing to raise approx. $1 billion in a year. Although its activites are an extension of the corporate-governance consulting work that Mr. Breeden has already been doing, it's nevertheless a hard fund to categorize. It's basically an ethical corporate-raider fund, a kind of 'Whitebeard' fund; the article calls it an "activist" fund. Its biggest investor of the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or Calpers. "According to Calpers, Breeden's fund, which aims to outperform the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index by 10 percent over the long term, returned 16.6 percent in its first six months. It beat the broad index by 2.82 percent."

2. The Hamilton Spectator has webbed an abridgement of a report by Romina Maurino, which concludes that Conrad Black will likely not face any charges from the Canadian legal system once the trial is over, although he "could be barred from trading in securities and from being a director or officer of a publicly traded company as a result of the verdict." [A slightly different abridgement has been webbed by the Guelph Mercury.]

3. The break that Mr. Boultbee was cut made item #2 in the Boston Globe's "Business Notebook."

4. Janet Whitman's latest report, webbed by the New York Post, is entitled "Boultbee Needn't Ex-Plane: Judge." It begins with: "Prosecutors at Conrad Black's fraud trial didn't prove Hollinger International's former CFO helped the dethroned press baron scam shareholders by using the company plane to jet off to Bora Bora for a vacation, a judge ruled yesterday." It notes that Judge St. Eve has restricted the prosecution's closing argument, barring the linking of Mr. Boultbee to the Bora Bora trip.

5. Rick Westhead of the Toronto Star has written a lengthy recap of the trial, now that closing arguments are approaching.

6. A much briefer report by Mary Wisniewski on the restriction of count 10 has been webbed by the Chicago Sun-Times.

7. Paul Waldie's report has been webbed by the Globe and Mail. It starts off with a mention of the restriction, and continues by noting "The ruling could be a sign that the judge may drop more charges. When prosecutors rested their case on May 30, all defendants filed motions to have the charges against them dropped. Of all the motions, Judge St. Eve expressed an interest in Mr. Boultbee's issue and several charges against defendant Mark Kipnis. The judge has not said when she will make further rulings." It ends by noting that Judge St. Eve has disallowed the inclusion of "a so-called 'Pinkerton charge,'" which the prosecution has been asking for, on the grounds that it was inappropriate to this case. Had it been granted, it would have allowed the jury to hold "one party to a conspiracy... liable for acts committed by others in the conspiracy."

8. The Malaysia Sun also has webbed a brief item on the restriction of the charge.