Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

It’s one of those numbers buried in a spreadsheet that, read the right way, opens a rich vein of permutation and implication. A line item in the 2007 second-quarter financial results for the Sun-Times media group (née Hollinger International) lists “Indemnification, investigation and litigation costs” as $25.118 million. The Sun-Times reports this morning that this figure represents “legal costs for the Sun-Times, mostly for the criminal defence of former employees, including former CEO Conrad Black.” Asked to break these numbers out and explain who, exactly, is costing what, Sun-Times spokesperson Tammy Chase responded, “We don’t break a lot of it out publicly, but what we do break out is this: we pay 75 per cent of Black’s criminal bills and 50 per cent of all other legal bills; we pay an undisclosed portion of the other defendants’ legal bills.”In other words (based entirely on my own speculation), Black costs way more than you think and the others cost less than you think.