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The two counts for which I have just received a presidential pardon, and of which I was “convicted” in 2011, after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously vacated them only to have a self-serving appellate judge reinstate them, were for wire fraud and obstruction of justice.

The alleged fraud was reception of $285,000 in my office in Toronto while I was in England, from our American company, which was approved by independent directors, referred to in public filings of the corporation, but which the company secretary had not completely formalized, in what the trial judge correctly regarded as a clerical error on the secretary’s part. The reinvention of this crime enabled the appellate panel to whom the Supreme Court remanded the vacated counts “to assess the gravity of their own errors” to resuscitate a count of obstruction of justice against me. This consisted of my removal of boxes of personal papers and material that had already been furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which I took out under security cameras I had had installed, with the approval of the acting president of the company and the principal member present of the court-appointed inspector, as I vacated my office of 27 years from a building I chiefly owned, on an unjust local court order of a publicity-seeking judge. The local jurisdiction found no cause of action nor any violation of a document retention order. I was always presumptively innocent in the initial jurisdiction. It was nonsense, all of it; there was never a word of truth to any of it. And now it is over, after 16 years, including three years and two weeks in U.S. federal prisons.