I am all for billionaires facing consequences for their actions. The death penalty is still deeply immoral though. Locking financial criminals up like for example the American state did with Martin Shkreli or Sam Bankman-Fried though is completely o.K. and should happen more often.
The death penalty is still deeply immoral though.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
It appears to be a method the courts are employing to encourage her to surrender overseas assets.
In this particular situation, that $27bn is over 5% of Vietnam’s GDP. This is a very significant hit to the nation’s financial stability and one that will likely result in substantial number of excess deaths entirely due to increased poverty. I can see the threat of execution as a method to compel repayment as necessary.
In a better world, foreign banks complicit in Truong’s 11 year long theft would cooperate to return the stolen money, thereby making this threat unnecessary. But so long as foreign financial institutions can hold a nation’s wealth hostage, all the Vietnamese state leadership can manage is to respond in kind.
Disclaimer: didn’t read the article yet.
But surely someone can’t commit such a huge fraud alone. Nobody at Saigon Commercial Bank is involved or culpable for loaning that amount to a fraudster?
But surely someone can’t commit such a huge fraud alone.
Right. I’m less upset by a single individual facing execution than I am not seeing a dozen other crooks lined up on the docket.
Now do the other billionaires.
More seriously though, this is fucked up.
Don’t kill them. Redistribute their wealth.
In this particular case, she’s hidden money overseas and the death penalty is being used to compel her to recover and return it.
I Propose we make any Fraud worldwide over a Billion Dollars punishable by Death to!
