In this article: Latest developments | Recap | Notebook

Latest developments:

Economist Marie-Josée Kravis, a former Hollinger board member, testified on Monday that for four years, the audit committee on which she sat lacked the financial expertise required by its charter. She told defence lawyer Eddie Greenspan that while the committee members were financially literate, the requirement that one member have management or accounting experience was not fulfilled.

Greenspan tried to show the jury that Kravis had knowingly put her signature to several non-compete payments preceeding the 2000 deal in which Canadian newspapers were sold to CanWest. "Sir, I can't remember reading something I don't recall receiving,'' she said to Greenspan.

"We just can't rely on your memory for anything, can we?'' Greenspan shot back in what was reportedly heated cross-examination.

Recap:

Two former members of Hollinger International's board of directors are set to testify this week that they were mislead by Conrad Black, Jack Boultbee and Peter Atkinson about the non-compete payments at the heart of the co-defendants' trial.

Given the prosecution's need to establish that fraud took place, the former directors' testimony could be critical to the case against Black and his co-defendants.

On Friday, Marie-Josée Kravis - a prominent economist who served on the company's audit committee - told the court that she asked Black about the controversial payments after shareholders and the media began accusing him and other executives of siphoning money away from the company. Kravis said she also suggested to Black to "be a little bit more humble" when dealing with shareholders, after he wrote to her and other directors saying he was prepared to "hose down shareholders in need of it."

"I suggested he take a more quiet tone," she told prosecutor Julie Ruder. "I thought it was in the best interest of the company."

Afterwards, Black sent Kravis a memo in which he acknowledged the budding controversy over the non-compete payments but said the issue should not be defused "with unjustified defensiveness." Black also told Kravis in the memo there had been no misuse of company jets for personal travel.

"Such matters are monitored carefully," Black wrote, "and there are no abuses."

Kravis also told the court she never approved any payments to either the executives or to Hollinger International's Canadian-based parent company, Hollinger Inc.

"That was money that belonged to the shareholders of [Hollinger] International," she said.

Defence lawyers are expected to question Kravis on Monday. She will be followed on the stand by James Thompson, the former governor of Illinois and a one-time chair of Hollinger International's audit committee. Thompson, the longest-serving governor in the state's history, is expected to echo the claims of other directors who have testified they were kept in the dark about the payments to Black, Boultbee and Atkinson.

Notebook:

• That Ms. Kravis is a very stylishly dressed woman is apparently of great interest to the Toronto Star's Jennifer Wells, who splices a considerable amount of fashion criticism into her Monday morning recap of the trial. Kravis' testimony about Barbara Amiel's five-digit birthday party in New York apparently attracted special notice from Black, who reportedly appeared highly annoyed when the prosecutor asked if Hollinger's corporate logo had been visible at La Grenouille.

• Steven Skurka recasts the slogans of Orwell's Ministry of Truth as "Reading is not seeing. Signing is not acknowledging. Auditing is not reviewing."
  
  "Perhaps," he writes, "when Julie Ruder asked Marie-Josee Kravis if she observed the Hollinger logo at Barbara Amiel’s birthday party, this was the logo that she was referring to."

• The Financial Times' Stephanie Kirchgaessner provides a more in-depth look at the relationship between Black and Kravis, one that apparently extended well into the social and philanthropic spheres.

• Shinan Govani, the National Post's man about town, reports that Allen Fotheringham "showed up at the Brazilian Ball last Saturday with a 'Free Conrad' T-shirt under his penguin-wear."

• The Irish Independent's Ruth Dudley Edwards continues her sympathetic-to-Black trial roundups, complaining that a fair proportion of the trial coverage in the UK now comes from the decidedly unsympathetic-to-Black Tom Bower. She quotes Craig Brown, a regular contributor to British satire magazine Private Eye, on Bower's flair for biography: "Santa Claus himself would be reduced to a reindeer-battering, present-snatching, chimney-creeping, sherry-swilling, out-of-work paedophile."

• Speaking of which, here's Tom Bower in the Sunday Times, making up for weeks of near-total silence in the UK broadsheets with a comprehensive recap to date. "Kravis’s appearance confirmed a turning point in the six-week trial," he writes. "She systematically contradicted Black’s defence and her shortest answers were the most damning."

• Macleans.ca blogger Mark Steyn notes that his inbox is chock-a-block with people who apparently believe that Black's famous "hose down shareholders in need of it" e-mail implied he was going to fleece said shareholders, or perhaps even spray them with gunfire. Macleans.ca is amazed and disappointed at this misunderstanding, since the image of a laughing Lord Black holding angry investors at bay with a firehose is easily the funniest yet to emerge from the trial.
  
  "I haven’t asked him about the Don Imus controversy about 'nappy-headed hos,'" Steyn notes in explaining how Black "eschews" the modern vernacular, "but, if I did, he would want to know why Mr Imus was putting diapers on farm implements."

• The Post's Peter Brieger has an in-depth piece on the "undistinguished" rating handed to highly regarded U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald - who filed the charges against Black - by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. "This shows that the evaluation process at the Justice Department is based entirely on political considerations, not performance considerations," one of Fitzgerald's former colleague tells Brieger.

With files from Canadian Press

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