TOUCH OF EVIL

The report of another "corporate kleptocracy" is making news this morning. It's not Kenny Boy's Enron or Bunker Boy's former company, Halliburton, or any of the no-bid contract players in Iraq. This time it's Hollinger International, a media company formerly led by Conrad Black and F. David Radler with the connivance of a board of directors featuring -- you guessed it -- none other than that neoconservative for all seasons, Richard Perle, "who is excoriated in the strongest terms" for "putting his own interests above those of Hollinger's shareholders."

Remember Richard Perle? The right-wing ideologue who advocates what might be termed a holy crusade in the Middle East and elsewhere? The intellectual guru of the "axis-of-evil" hardliners in foreign policy? The guy who used to be chairman of the private Defense Policy Board, which advises Rummy Boy? The guy who stepped down as chairman and then resigned from that board altogether to avoid having his views associated with the administration's or the Defense Department's during the Nincompoop in Chief's re-election campaign?

Oh, and let's not forget the other heavyweights on the Hollinger board, such as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former head of the Democratic National Committee Robert Strauss and former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Burt, who were let off by the 513-page report "with little more than a rebuke" for showing their lack of curiosity about the "systematic looting" by Black and Radler of "virtually all the company's $400 million in earnings over seven years."

Compared to that amount, Perle's take was chicken feed -- a mere $3.1 million -- on "an unusual deal" that gave him and other insiders "a share of profits from good investments without requiring those amounts to be offset by losses from bad investments," according to New York Times financial columnist Floyd Norris. But the downside for the company was much greater than that. As chairman of Hollinger's Internet investing subsidiary, "Mr. Perle was responsible for $63.6 million in Hollinger investments, on which the company lost a net $49 million," Norris notes in his description of the report, which was filed as part of an attempt by Hollinger to recover $1.25 billion from Black and others.

The polite honorific "Mr." is a Times custom. The Hollinger report is much less polite, essentially calling Perle an incompetent and a thief who owes the company $5.4 million and maybe more. "Perle's own description of his performance on the executive committee was stunning," the report states, referring to a triumvirate that consisted of Black, Radler and Perle. Perle admitted he often didn't read documents presented to him but signed them anyway and never discussed them with his two cohorts, who stood to gain the most from them. The report says, according to Norris:

It is difficult to imagine a more flagrant abdication of duty than a director rubber-stamping transactions that directly benefit a controlling shareholder without any thought, comprehension or analysis. In fact, many of the consents that Perle signed as an executive committee member approved related-party transactions that unfairly benefited Black and Radler, and cost Hollinger millions.

So let's remember: This is the guy who has had "profound influence over Bush policies and officials in the competition for the hearts of the president and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice," according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post. This is the guy whose reckless advice to the nation on how to win the war on terror is called "An End to Evil." Coming from a guy with his own evil touch, a guy who has put the touch on thousands of shareholders to the tune of millions of dollars, that's chutzpah.