The demise of Conrad Black, press tycoon in the Anglosphere. A collateral damage of financial globalisation

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In July 2007, the British (ex-Canadian) financer Conrad Black was condemned by an American court to 6 years and a half of prison, which he is presently serving in Florida. This essay attempts to consider this sentence as a collateral damage of the battle to inject ethics in the financial business, which originated in the United States at the turn of the century in the aftermath of important scandals (notably Enron and Worldcom) where shareholders were despoiled by managers. It depicts Conrad Black as a typical example of a certain business mentality grown out of the British colony of Canada, born out of the adventurers’ greed, their strong belief in their own superiority and their burning desire to succeed in the colony, so as to be honoured and made peers in London. That culture collided, in the United States, in the context of the growing crisis of the financial activities’ governance – the judiciary saga of Conrad Black began in 2003 –, with another business culture, equally ferocious, but that has learned to manage more deftly and even to use the moral consequences of the idea of democratic equality.