Black’s son is chip off the old block

Jonathan Black, the 30-year-old son of the fallen media baron, Conrad Black, has escaped going the way of his father - to jail. Black Jnr (pictured behind his father, at his trial last July) has been fined $2,000 by a court in Toronto on motoring offences. He pleaded guilty to failing to remain at the scene of an accident, driving while under suspension and following another vehicle too closely, following a collision in the city in March. In return, a more serious charge of failing to stop after an accident was dropped, the Toronto Star reports.

It had been thought that Black, a bond trader, might get a stiffer sentence because of previous brushes with the law. Court papers showed that in 1997 when he was 19 and a part-time model he received a suspended sentence for making threats to cause bodily harm to a man and a woman. A few weeks earlier he had been released on $2,000 bail after being accused of uttering a death sentence to another man. The court ordered him to avoid alcohol, non-prescribed drugs, the company of criminals and to live at a sanatorium. The charge was withdrawn.

For his latest case, Black employed the same insouciance as his father exhibited in Chicago last year when he received his six-year sentence for criminal fraud and obstructing justice. Dressed in a pink shirt, the son stood with his hands in his pockets, chewing gum, as he listened to the judge's ruling.