Appeal court clears Black of two convictions

Former media tycoon Conrad Black today had two fraud convictions dismissed by a court, but it upheld the guilty verdicts on one fraud and one obstruction of justice charges.

The 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals said a recent US Supreme Court ruling curtailing so called “honest services” laws meant the two fraud convictions had to be quashed.

The government had conceded the two convictions rested partly on the idea that Black deprived his former company of his faithful services as a corporate officer.

Black once controlled a media empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Telegraph and community papers in the US and Canada.

After serving two years of a six and-a-half-year sentence, he was recently freed from a Florida federal prison pending the appeal.