Comment by cultofmetatron
15 hours ago
10 years for refusing to to say where he found gold is wild. people who committed fraud against elderly people and child molesters often get sentenced for less than that.
15 hours ago
10 years for refusing to to say where he found gold is wild. people who committed fraud against elderly people and child molesters often get sentenced for less than that.
> 10 years for refusing to to say where he found gold is wild.
No, that's not what happened. I'm guessing you saw this news before under a clickbait title.
It's not about where gold was found, it's about where he stashed it later. These are assets that are (or were) in his hands which partially belong to all the investors he defrauded.
Still point stand that fraud is at times punished harsher then rape or child molesting
The fraud isn’t what he’s being punished for.
The ongoing refusal to answer questions under oath is.
He could have agreed to talk anytime and been released shortly.
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Rape and child molesting is often, unfortunately, hard to prove in a court of law. This case is the opposite.
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I don’t understand why he won’t just share it, that’s Thorin Oakenshield level of crazy to choose jail over that.
“On my life, I will not part with a single coin.”
Glad to see a Hobbit reference here. That's the first thing I thought of when I read the article. Totally bizarre.
He defrauded his investors. As much as I find that funny, what he did was a white collar crime that has consequences.
Right.
It’s a mystery to me how on one day on HN you will see “corporate death penalty” discussed and on the next “$400MM white collar crimes should not be punished as much as murdering a single person”.
If this were Apple, Google, or Meta having committed the crime, I think the tenor of the discussion would be very different.
It's almost as if comments on a website called "hacker news" are written by individuals with differing and varying opinions, and not by some nebulous hive-mind that purports to be internally consistent.
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Yeah it's a sad consequence but... He effectively stole from others, why are people shocked? And yes contempt charges shouldn't go this long, but that's a separate qualm than "should he be criminally charged at all".
In Germany, financial crimes are often punished much harder than capital crimes too. Tells you where the priorities lie.
Well, you could look at it from the perspective of incentives. The number of people who would commit a financial crime for $LARGE_SUM in exchange for a short stint in prison is much higher than the number of people who would commit rape or murder for the same stint. Most people don’t even want to commit murder or rape. But most people do want money and if you presented them the opportunity to get it in a non violent manner that they could rationalize in any way…well, now you need some heavy disincentives.
That's true in the US as well. It's because that kind of crime undermines faith in the financial system, something it must have to function. People grumble about white collar criminals getting light sentences, but the easiest way to get sent to jail for fifty years is to swindle a bunch of pensioners out of their life's savings.
There's a huge difference though, at least in the US: If a company (or very wealthy individual) commits a financial crime, then after they are caught (maybe) and investigated (maybe) and they mount an unsuccessful defense (maybe) and they are fined (maybe) and they lose their five appeals (maybe), after all that happens, they might pay a small token fine that doesn't even approach the damage they did, and have to pinky-swear to a judge that they'll never do it again. Nobody's going to prison. If a normie individual commits a similar financial crime, they're going to be financially ruined and go to prison.
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That is if you do it the stupid way. If you do it the plausibly deniable way, or with sufficient political backing, such as the current US president or one of the US senators from Florida, then nothing happens, except maybe gaining more power.
Always have your conversations in person and have underlings sign documents relating to transactions.
Also, you can systemically steal from future generations with no consequence, as a voter and leader. Promise people today big pensions and retiree healthcare, underfund today by telling actuaries to use unrealistic assumptions, or just straight up ignore funding recommendations, and then let the debt pile up for others to deal with.
>"It's because that kind of crime undermines faith in the financial system"
LOL. The whole system is based on constantly stealing fruits of one's labor by way of inflation and 2 classes of haves and have-nots in regards to real assets. How can regular Joe have faith in it is beyond my comprehension.
To be fair, that’s pretty common and the justification is that it’s much more difficult to get caught (and the criminals are usually much smarter and better at not getting caught too).
Where is that justification given?
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Well it's not shocking given your countries history. Both target crimes usually committed by their minority groups.
they mostly get elected to positions of great power i guess
Most don't even get sentenced at all, what's your point?