3 firms, exec to pay Sun-Times
Three newspaper companies and a top associate to former newspaper baron Conrad Black agreed to pay more than $63.4 million to Sun-Times Media Group Inc. to settle legal claims and pay outstanding debt, officials said Monday.
David Radler, the former president of Hollinger International Inc. who is now the star witness in the trial against Black, agreed to pay $21.2 million to the Sun-Times, the Chicago-based company said.
Radler’s wholly owned North American Newspapers Ltd. will pay $23.3 million. Meanwhile, Horizon Publishing Co. and Bradford Publishing Co., companies controlled by Black and Radler, agreed to pay $11.78 million and $7.15 million, respectively.
The deal came two days after Radler agreed to pay $28.7 million to settle civil fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC accused Black and Radler of looting the company of $84 million. Radler, who neither acknowledged nor denied the SEC allegations, also was barred for life from serving as an officer or director of a public company.
Radler pleaded guilty in September 2005 to taking part in a scheme to siphon $32 million from Hollinger, the parent of the Sun-Times and other newspapers. He agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in exchange for a 29-month sentence and $250,000 criminal fine and became a witness against Black -- the former Hollinger chairman whose trial on charges of racketeering, mail and tax fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice began last week in Chicago.
From 1999 until 2003, the SEC said, Black and Radler used a complex series of self-dealing transactions to divert to themselves and others some $85 million of the proceeds from Hollinger’s sales of newspapers.
Black’s Hollinger media empire once controlled the Sun-Times, the Daily Telegraph of London, the National Post of Canada, the Jerusalem Post in Israel and hundreds of smaller newspapers.
The reduced holdings of the company, now called Sun-Times Media Group Inc., consist mainly of that Chicago tabloid and several community newspapers around the city.
