TORONTO — Conrad Black's upcoming fraud trial in Chicago will come replete with a lord and his lady, high-powered attorneys, and allegations of corporate greed - but it will be lacking one thing: a sympathetic victim.

Unlike other high-profile cases such as Enron, in which thousands of average workers lost their pension savings and jobs after the collapse of the energy giant, the charges against Black and his co-defendants impacted mostly institutional shareholders and companies controlled by the former newspaper baron.

"It's not the everyday investor," said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Michigan and a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer.

"What will handicap the government ... to a degree is (it's) not the Enron/WorldCom type situation where you had people losing their jobs and the company collapsed."

Black is facing charges of mail and wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, racketeering and tax violations. If convicted, he faces up to 101 years in prison.

Black's trial begins in a Chicago court with jury selection Wednesday.

Also charged are former Hollinger executives Jack Boultbee, Peter Atkinson and Mark Kipnis, who face mail or wire fraud charges. All four have pleaded not guilty.

Black has repeatedly denied all the allegations against him and has said he looks forward to his date in court, famously saying last year: "The U.S. Marines couldn't keep me away."

After Black was forced out as chief executive of Hollinger International, his main newspaper operating company based in Chicago, share prices began falling and investors lost a big chunk of their investments on paper. But later restructurings of the Hollinger group didn't lead to widespread job cuts.

While some did lose money after the scandal broke, Hollinger was not a widely held company, controlled in large part by institutional investors and, above all, Black himself.

Wall Street investment firm Tweedy Browne Co. launched the shareholder revolt against Black when it sent a "demand letter" to Hollinger International in 2003 asking its directors to investigate payments made to its executives.

That eventually led to a federal investigation, focused on the selloff of small newspapers across the United States and Canada by Hollinger and so-called non-compete agreements that sent millions of dollars to Black and fellow executives.

Hollinger Inc. (TSX:HLG.C), the Toronto holding company which at its peak was Canada's largest newspaper proprietor and owned international properties ranging from the London Telegraph to the Jerusalem Post, has been reduced to one main asset: a 19.7 per cent interest in Sun Times Media Group Inc., formerly Hollinger International. Last week, Hollinger Inc. warned its future was in doubt, as it reported deepening losses after finally catching up on years of overdue financial filings.

Its shares, worth about $10 a few years ago, closed Friday at 55 cents on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Sun Times owns the Chicago Sun-Times and assorted Chicago-area community papers. That company has lost money every year since 2001, cut its workforce by 10 per cent last year and inherited millions of dollars in legal fees.

The job losses impacted about 260 full-time employees.

A company spokeswoman called the trial "a matter between Conrad, his co-defendants and the United States government."

"Obviously, we're monitoring it closely (and) editorially, our papers will cover it as thoroughly and aggressively as we would any other news story," she said.

Despite the fallout, Henning insisted the Sun-Times survived "and actually did quite well."

"That makes it a little bit more of a challenge for the government to show was there really a victim or (whether) all we're really talking about is a corporate dispute."

But Duff Conacher, chair of Democracy Watch's Corporate Responsibility Coalition in Ottawa, said the fiasco should not be viewed as "everything is fine for all other investors."

"It's a systemic problem. It reveals systemic flaws in the regulation of corporate structures and the investment industry," he said.

"The government should be ensuring that no company can be structured in such a way that reduces accountability and allows unjustifiable moves to be hidden."

Author and journalist George Jonas has jumped to Black's defence, arguing that shareholders would have been better off with Black in charge, and attributing the "coup to oust Black" and his associates to greed.

The ouster, he argued in a column in the National Post, the newspaper Black founded in 1998, "reduced what used to be the world's third-largest newspaper publishing company to owning a handful of Chicago-area tabloids and shopping guides" and cost stockholders "hundreds of millions of dollars, with no realistic plan to recoup a penny."

But Porter Bibb, managing partner at Mediatech Capital Partners in New York, considers Black's ability to have turned Sun Times' fortunes around unrealistic.

"They're caught in the same downdraft that all of the major newspaper companies are suffering through right now, and then they've got Black and Hollinger on top of that," he said.

"It's conventional wisdom in the extreme where if the New York Times and the Washington Post can't slow it down - and if the Tribune Company is facing either breakup, or liquidation or some other dire future - Sun Times Media is not going to be any different, no matter who's running it."

In the end, experts say the identity of the victim is not relevant to determining whether Black and his co-defendants are guilty.

But they admit it may affect public opinion, and that explains why this case has not captivated the American public the way Enron did.

When Enron collapsed, "you had lots of 'widows and orphans' who were deeply affected by the fraud," said Ross Albert, a lawyer at Morris, Manning & Martin in Atlanta and former prosecutor and SEC lawyer.