Conrad Black ran up a £3.5 million bill every year flying his corporate jet, including trips to an island in the South Pacific and the opera in Seattle, a court was told.

Details of the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by the peer and former chairman of The Daily Telegraph emerged during his trial in Chicago for looting $60 million (£30 million) from his newspaper empire.

Lord Black of Crossharbour routinely billed the company when he took the jet to travel to his estate in the Florida resort of Palm Beach, a government witness testified.

Fred Creasey, the former comptroller of the newspaper conglomerate, told the court that the chief financial officer at the time — Lord Black’s codefendant Jack Boultbee — approved billing the company for aircraft trips by the press baron and his former right-hand man, David Radler. “He said it was reasonable to let Mr Black and Mr Radler use the aircraft — they were working all the time — it was a reasonable business expense,” Mr Creasey testified.

The accountant said that, although the flights to Florida were written off as a business expense, a trip to the French Polynesian island of Bora Bora made him uncomfortable.

Asked by the prosecutor to locate Bora Bora for the jury, Mr Creasey could say only: “In the South Pacific, somewhere.”

“Does Hollinger International have any business operations in Bora Bora?” the prosecutor asked. “No,” Mr Creasey replied.

Lord Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, took a round trip from Teterboro airport outside New York to Seattle, Honolulu, Tahiti and Bora Bora, stopping in Seattle to go to the opera.

Mr Creasey said that he had “inherited the assumption” that all of Lord Black’s flights were to be billed to the company. He usually assigned the cost of all transatlantic flights to the Telegraph group in London, while flights between Canada and the US were split between the conglomerate’s Canadian and US arms. But he said that the Bora Bora trip “did not fit into my allocation methodology” so he sent Lord Black a memo asking who was going to pay the $565,326 bill. Lord Black, in a handwritten response on the corner of Mr Creasey’s typed memo, said that the flights were “mainly within the US” but that he was “happy to pay” half himself.

After consulting Mr Boultbee, Mr Creasey billed half the cost to Ravelston Corp, Lord Black’s Toronto-based holding company, and the rest to the newspaper group.

Prosecutors have included charges relating to the Bora Bora trip and other corporate perks in an apparent effort to hold the attention of the predominantly working-class jury in a case focused mainly on complex “noncompete payments”. As the case gets bogged down in financial details, there is growing speculation that prosecutors may bring forward an appearance by their star witness, Mr Radler, who has pleaded guilty in exchange for a lenient 29-month sentence.

Defence lawyers have sought to show that the suspect “noncompete” payments were approved by the company’s board, which included the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, a former Pentagon official, and James Thompson, a former Governor of Illinois.

But Mr Creasey said that the directors had become increasingly suspicious of the payments and he told Lord Black that the company’s audit committee and its chairman, Mau-reen Sabia, would not approve the payouts if they were not reported in a timely manner. Lord Black replied: “Dear Fred, ignore anything she and her superfluous committee says.”

The next day, Lord Black wrote him another memo, conceding that his earlier missive might have sounded “a bit abrupt”. The trial continues.

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge