Mark Kipnis, the former Hollinger lawyer accused of helping Conrad Black and others engineer a $60m fraud at the newspaper publisher, relied heavily on the legal and accounting advice of a top law firm in Canada and KPMG, according to his attorney’s opening defence statement on Wednesday.
While prosecutors this week painted Mr Kipnis as an insider who helped Lord Black and other former Hollinger executives “get away with” abuses at the company by hiding information from the board, Ron Safer, Mr Kipnis’s attorney, said Mr Kipnis, a plain-speaking and “stable person” who was “not a spectacular guy”, repeatedly relied on the advice of both firms and went out of his way to ensure that Hollinger’s audit committee was aware of the so-called “non-compete agreements” that the government has said were fraudulent.
The indictment of Mr Kipnis, who only ever had five conversations with Lord Black but is being tried alongside the Canadian-born peer, underscores the complexity of the case before the jurors.
While most media attention has focused on the case against Lord Black, jurors will also separately be judging three other men – Jack Boultbee and Peter Atkinson, trained accountants who were top executives at Hollinger, and Mr Kipnis.
