Perle Asserts Hollinger's Conrad Black Misled Him By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: September 6, 2004
ASHINGTON, Sept. 5 - Last fall, as the board of Hollinger International prepared to oust its founding executive, Conrad M. Black, the director most protective and supportive of him turned to a friend and balked.
"This is a kangaroo court," a person recalled the director, Richard N. Perle, as saying in defense of Lord Black, who had been accused by investors of improperly siphoning millions of dollars to other companies he controlled.
But last week, Mr. Perle's view of Lord Black changed. Issuing his first public statements since being heavily criticized in an internal report for rubber-stamping transactions that company investigators say led to the plundering of the company, Mr. Perle now says he was duped by his friend and business colleague.
Mr. Perle, a top Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, wielded considerable influence in foreign-policy circles as recently as 2002 as an intellectual parent to the neoconservatives. He was named to the Hollinger board in 1994, joining other like-minded men selected by Lord Black, a self-made businessman from Canada who surrounded himself with conservative thinkers. He particularly did that at Hollinger, a global media company whose holdings at the time included The Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post, The Sunday and Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald.
But the relationship between the two men was particularly special, friends and Hollinger officials recall. Lord Black approved plans that ultimately earned Mr. Perle more than $5 million - including a bonus formula that rewarded Mr. Perle for the successful investments he placed on behalf of a subsidiary of Hollinger but did not subtract for the losers. Mr. Perle served on a three-member executive committee of the board headed by Lord Black. The two men socialized frequently and traveled together extensively on the company jet, once going to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Mysterious Republican Money By Robert Parry September 7, 2004 If House Speaker Dennis Hastert is really concerned about drug profits being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. Hastert would be looking at a principal conservative funder: South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon.
While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of evidence that the liberal Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a substantial body of evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal enterprise with close ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The evidence includes first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by Moon confidantes and even family members. Besides those more recent accounts, Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in the late 1970s about his money-laundering activities.
Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.
Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party.
How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of his media empire and pay for lavish conservative conferences has been one of the most enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of the least investigated – at least since the Reagan-Bush era.
Limited investigations of Moon’s organization have revealed large sums of money flowing into the United States mostly from untraceable accounts in Japan, where Moon had close ties to yakuza gangster Ryoichi Sasakawa. Former Moon associates also have revealed major money flows from shadowy sources in South America, where Moon built relationships with right-wing elements associated with the cocaine trade, including the so-called Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia in the early 1980s.
But Hastert, an Illinois Republican, made news at the Republican National Convention by suggesting that liberal funder Soros may be fronting for foreign “drug groups.” In a Fox News appearance, Hastert said, “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where – if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from.…”
Soros demanded an apology for the smear. “Your recent comments implying that I am receiving funds from drug cartels are not only untrue, but also deeply offensive,” Soros said in a letter. “You do a discredit to yourself and to the dignity of your office by engaging in these dishonest smear tactics. You should be ashamed.”
A Bush-Style Warning
Hastert and other Republicans seem to have targeted Soros because he has helped finance liberal activist groups that have engaged in voter registration drives and run TV ads criticizing George W. Bush. Hastert and other Bush loyalists could be laying down a marker that people who finance anti-Bush politics can expect to have their reputations destroyed and possibly become subjects of federal investigations.
Yet for Moon, despite his criminal record and eyewitness accounts of his money-laundering activities, opposite rules apply. Republicans – who now control the Executive Branch, the Congress and the federal judiciary – protect Moon and his money from any serious examination.
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