Conrad Black, the wealthy Canadian who was chairman of a Chicago-based newspaper empire, may be headed back to prison after two of his crimes were upheld on appeal.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago reviewed Black’s 2007 fraud conviction for a second time, after the  Supreme Court called it into question in June. In a unanimous ruling Friday, the appellate court affirmed Black’s guilty verdicts on one count of defrauding Hollinger International Inc. and obstruction of justice but vacated two of his fraud convictions.

With only a partial victory in his quest for exoneration, Black, 66, will be resentenced for the two crimes by the federal judge who presided over his trial. He was freed on bail in July pending his appeal, after the Supreme Court sharply limited a federal fraud statute known as “honest services,” often used against business executives as well as politicians in corruption cases.

Black, along with three other senior Hollinger executives, had been accused of depriving company and its shareholders of their honest services, as well as looting millions of dollars through fraudulent non-compete agreements. Hollinger once owned more than 300 newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Jerusalem Post and Canada’s National Post. Black was originally sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison and had served about two years when he was released.

While it remains to be seen what new sentence the trial judge, Amy St. Eve, will impose, the appellate court did not hold back in offering guidance. Judge Richard Posner, who wrote the opinion, said the judge could consider evidence from the overturned counts, which was interpreted by legal experts to mean St. Eve should feel free to impose the same sentence she did before. In that case, Black will return to prison.

His attorney declined to comment on Black’s fate or whether he would fight the remaining two convictions. In a statement Miguel Estrada said: “We are reviewing the court’s opinion carefully, and in the coming weeks we will be considering our next steps in light of that review.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago declined to comment on whether it would immediately seek to revoke Black’s bail pending sentencing. The office said in statement that it was pleased that the appellate court upheld two of the convictions and will inform the trial judge of its intentions at the appropriate time.

Prosecutors can now retry Black and his co-defendants, Peter Atkinson, John Boultbee and Mark Kipnis, on the two vacated fraud counts, although Posner seemed to discourage that option.

“The government may wish instead, in order to conserve its resources and wind up this protracted litigation …  and proceed directly to resentencing,” Posner wrote.

In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Black had sought to have his fraud conviction thrown out, arguing it was not certain whether the jury had found him guilty of honest-services fraud or the fraudulent misappropriation of money, which the appellate court called “pecuniary fraud.” Black also contended that the jury might have acquitted him of the obstruction charge for removing 13 boxes of documents from his Toronto office if it had not received erroneous instructions about honest-services fraud.

Two of the fraud convictions involved $5.5 million Black and other executives received for agreeing not to compete with a Hollinger subsidiary called APC for three years after they stopped working for the company. Hollinger’s board nor its audit committee had been informed of the transaction. The defendants had argued that the payment represented management fees that had been recharacterized as non-compete fees to avoid taxation in Canada.

A three-judge panel of the 7th circuit found that the APC counts were “a solid honest-services case before the Supreme Court weighed in, but not a solid pecuniary-fraud case” and voided the convictions. The Supreme Court held that there must be evidence of bribes or kickbacks in order to be convicted of honest services fraud.

The third fraud conviction involved $600,000 in connection with the sale of community papers to two companies, Forum Communications and Paxton Communications. The appellate court said the jury could not have judged these non-compete payments as nothing other than “plain-vanilla pecuniary fraud” because they were never asked for by the buyers, never disclosed and never put on paper.