HOLLINGER INTERNATIONAL
Hollinger Inc. was the parent company of Chicago-based Hollinger International, whose primary holdings included a group of Chicago newspapers. Its flagship paper was the Chicago Sun-Times. Hollinger also owned The Jerusalem Post and interests in Australian and Canadian newspaper chains. Hollinger's non-Canadian papers were sold to Hollinger International in 1996. Hollinger became a holding company for stakes in various companies, including its controlling stake in Hollinger International.
Ravelston Corporation, a private corporation owned by Thatcherite Conrad Black and Neo-conservative David Radler controlled their former newspaper empire. Ravelston owned Argus Corporation which in turn controlled Chicago-based Hollinger International via Hollinger Inc.
The ownership structure of Hollinger and other related companies was described as "complex" and "convoluted."
Hollinger International Inc—and its shareholders—lent money to an entity controlled by Conrad Black, paid massive management fees to entities controlled by Black, sold assets to companies controlled by Black, and maintained a condominium for Black in New York. The board of directors approved every step of the way. It wasn’t until this Monday—when a special committee of outsiders, formed at the urging of shareholder activist Tweedy Browne, disclosed $32 million in unreported or improperly reported compensation to Black and other executives—that he was forced to step down.
Reason for Black's Empire
Hollinger didn't only exist as an operation to steal for investors. It existed to serve the interests of Conrad Black and David Radler which they shared with the networks operated by the oligarchy, corporations and military industrial complex establishment. The goal was to shape public thought into supporting their agendas.
Zionism
Black's notably rightwing brand of Zionism which tends to regard the Palestinians, like their leader Yasser Arafat (to quote from an article he wrote in the Post in 1993,) as "vile and primitive".
As a result, uniquely among British papers, the foreign pages of the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs have contained a notable absence of clear, critical reporting of Israel's deadly methods of suppressing Palestinian dissent. Their comment pages have been even more extreme.
Edward Luttwack, a former Israeli tank commander and friend of Black, writing to celebrate the election of Sharon whom he praised as "a master of outwitting his opponents", and a "raging bull who is really a matador" - as if he were some sort of jolly sporting hero rather than the man who failed to stop the single most gruesome massacre in the entire Arab-Israeli conflict. Then there are the regular appearances of Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, who recently concluded a two-page spread in the Telegraph by comparing the Palestinians to "animals".
It was against this background that a major row erupted three weeks ago when the Spectator columnist Taki (familiar to Guardian readers from his frequent appearances as a runaway waiter in Matthew Norman's diary) broke the unspoken ban on criticising Israel in a Black paper by writing a piece which Black described, in an emotional 3,000-word retort, as "almost worthy of Goebbels".
Since then the Spectator letters page has been like a war zone, with Black flinging increasingly hysterical accusations at anyone who dissents from his views. Lord Gilmour, who had written to defend Taki, was accused of "seeming like a common or garden Jew baiter". In a second letter in the same letters page, more than half of which was filled by Black himself, Piers Paul Read, AN Wilson, Charles Glass and I - all Spectator writers who had written to protest at the skewed coverage of Israel-Palestine in Black's papers - were denounced by Black as representative of "the depths of the problem of anti-semitism in the British media".
https://www.exposetheenemy.com/hollinger-international
Full 31 pages in file