Conrad Black: I'll Keep My Seat In The Lords

Former media tycoon Conrad Black, who was jailed for defrauding investors, says he has nothing to be ashamed of and will continue to sit in the House of Lords.

The peer was released in May after serving three years in a US jail. In an interview with Sky's political editor, Adam Boulton, he insisted he had done nothing wrong.

When asked if he planned to continue to sit in the House of Lords, he said: "Presumably, but I haven't decided that.

"I do not accept that these charges in this manner have any validity and they certainly would not have occurred in this country."

He insisted he had been unfairly targeted by the US legal system.

"The fact that 99.5% of prosecutions in that country end in convictions ? it's such a stacked deck. We so dismembered their case and struck down the prosecuting statute as unconstitutional, I feel I've done quite well."

Black was sentenced to more than six years in prison after his conviction for fraud and obstruction of justice at a high-profile trial in Chicago in 2007.

Prosecutors said he received millions of dollars in payments from companies who had bought newspapers from his Hollinger International group, in return for promises that he would not compete against them.

It was alleged he and other executives pocketed the money, which should have gone to shareholders, without telling Hollinger's board of directors.

Black was released two years into his sentence to pursue an appeal that was partially successful.

A judge reduced his sentence to three years and he returned to prison last September.

Black is now British, having renounced his Canadian citizenship to take his seat in the Lords several years earlier, but the country of his birth has given him a one-year residency permit.

However, Black insisted he is "not a refugee" struggling to find a place to live.

He said: "I am a passport-carrying citizen of the EU, I can live anywhere I want of these 27 countries. I'm not a refugee struggling desperately from place to place for some place to lay my head you know? I'm alright, I'm doing fine."