> his concerns about the japanese justice system arent all wrong. so not that simple
Conveniently, he cannot stand trial in France, which has also called for his arrest based on their own investigations, because he chose to become an international fugitive in Lebanon [1].
That said, I believe there has been prosecutorial interest around Anthony Ghosn--Carlos's son living in, to my last recollection, California--due to payments he made to the Taylors [2]. (The daughter, Maya, who is profiled in the article helping him escape is also in California, though there is no interest in charging her to my knowledge.)
Nation states would never put out empty statements they know they legally cannot act on to soothe other nation states, or, less charitable to the French government, collude with other nation states to imprison inconvenient actors.
I know the tech scene tends to fawn over Japanese culture, but business and government there lean conservative like every other nation state right now. My experience is that it’s 100% possible some xenophobes within industry have a very “Brexit-like” mentality about their nation and the fear of Renault-Nissan culture clash was leveraged to trump up charges.
Note I said it’s possible. Ultimately none of us really know, but the Japanese are “just people” too. No reason to believe they’re aren’t pulling an “Assange” like the west.
> Conveniently, he cannot stand trial in France, which has also called for his arrest based on their own investigations, because he chose to become an international fugitive in Lebanon.
(Without getting into value judgments about the merits of the case,) this quote from Leo McGarry comes to mind:
> Well, that's why he did it. You can't fault him for having a winning strategy.
he is also wanted in France for similar embezzlement, I don't understand why so many expats and people who never been in Japan are suddenly defending a grifter.
Not convicted yet, and apparently he does want to be tried just in France and not in Japan.
A lot of the accusations are for standard rich people crimes which is some amount of tax avoidance. You can basically pick and choose who you want to target because as panama papers shows pretty much all rich people are dodging taxes to some degree.
Except he wasn't evading taxes, he was paying himself extra money that he deemed was justified but was not approved or made aware to the company. I don't know why people are defending Ghosn, I suspect with all that money, he was able to hire an internet marketing company to flood the comment section like they did on Reddit.
Still doesn't change the fact that Interpol has a red notice for Ghosn.
Seems more like a civil thing. He was the CEO. Seemed like they used all these things as reasons to oust him. Doesn’t change the fact that trial hasn’t happened yet.
He is rich and able, I would have done the same if I was in his shoes so I don't judge him from moral perspective. I'm on the same page with the Germans on this one, i.e. it shouldn't be a crime and it's not wrong to escape from prison.
That said, not being him, I really don't like the narrative built around how Japanese prisons are horrible and it's justified to not serve for crimes in Japan. I also wonder if the "Japanese prisons and legal system are not good" editorials were coordinated.
IMHO, if Japanese system is that bad, People should stop going to Japan or take action to fix it for everyone instead of normalising the getting of scott-free for the elite.
Uh, yes it is. Maybe if you’re imprisoned illegally (kidnapping or by kangaroo court) but in the general case—in a democracy with actual courts, it’s wrong.
You think the cartel bosses that escaped from Mexico’s prisons were not morally and ethically wrong on multiple levels? Just because there’s also some corruption in the gov? Or because the prisons aren’t great. That’s unreasonable
meh it's the shit that got them in there that was wrong. it may give us the justification to hold them prisoner but they still aren't morally required to not escape. like it's up to the judge what sentence they get so how could that even be a moral obligation?
I think the burden for imprisonment and compelling people to stay in prison is on the punishers.
That should not be confused with the crimes being wrong, I'm talking about ones desire not to be imprisoned being a natural desire and acting on it not being wrong by itself.
There are major issues with Japan's justice system though . I mean just reading the link on this thread made me sad
Michael Taylor. Mr. Taylor pleaded guilty to aiding Mr. Ghosn’s escape and started a two-year sentence at Tokyo’s Fuchu Prison in the summer of 2021; he spends much of his day in solitary confinement.
I think the argument here is that being in prison is a bad experience and wanting to escape is normal, natural human behaviour. As such, the onus is not on the prisoner to stay inside, but on the guards to keep them there. Escaping is, as such, not a crime in itself.
Because it's a natural instinct to seek freedom. It's in human nature. Like, expecting a prisoner to keep sitting in their cell when suddenly all doors spring open is ridiculous.
Sure it’s a natural instinct, but society as a whole views it as ethically, morally, and legally “wrong”. We don’t allow individual’s selfish motives to rule society in other areas.
Either way, the person I was responding to did not say it was a natural desire, they only said it was “not wrong”.
I guess there are different levels on which you can look at this. If a rapist escapes from prison I certainly don't celebrate that. I want him to get captured again as quickly as possible. But I do not think it should add anything to his sentence, at least not for the attempt itself. If he hurt anyone, broke/stole something on his way out that's a different issue.
I can think of at least one nation that disagrees: Germany.
To quote Wikipedia "In some other places like Germany and a number of other countries, it is considered human nature to want to escape from a prison and it is considered as a violation of the right of freedom, so escape is not penalized in itself (in the absence of other factors such as threats of violence, actual violence, or property damage)."
I've read that Japanese prosecutors win something like 98% of the cases they bring. If true, it suggests that either they let a lot of crimes go unprosecuted in Japan, which doesn't ring true, or that their police have godlike powers of investigation and discernment (ditto), or that the adversarial court system really is a bit too adversarial from the defendant's point of view.
So I can't say I wouldn't have done the same as Ghosn, given the necessary resources. Right or wrong wouldn't be a consideration, as long as I could rationalize an assumption of bad faith on the courts' part.
Edit: I guess it could also suggest that the police in Japan are hopeless fuckups who only manage to catch the most flagrantly-incompetent criminals. That doesn't sound any more realistic than the other possibilities IMO.
It would be fucked up if prosecutors weren't winning well over 90% of their cases, because being prosecuted is a punishment in and of itself --- it's ruinously expensive. So you'd very much hope prosecution is reserved for slam-dunk cases, as federal prosecution is in the US, where prosecutors also have a ~95% success rate.
They alternative, where prosecutors lose so many cases that their win rate goes down into the 70's or 60's, implies that prosecutors are taking lots of flyers just see how the cases shake out. That would be a tremendous abuse.
All of those options are true, but you forgot the forced confessions. 30 days detention before charging is long enough for the bruises to heal. On the other hand, they prosecute far less crime across all categories than in the United States.
The staff of prosecutors is much smaller in Japan, so it likely means they mostly prosecute the winnable cases. In contrast in the US, a district attorney might choose to prosecute cases which make themself more electable.
From what I've read, I suspect both those things are true: lots of crimes go unprosecuted, as well as the police having godlike powers.
But - FWIW - prosecutors in the US tend to have win rates north of 90% as well. 98% is excessively high, yes, but we're talking single digit percentages compared to a country with comparatively more crime.
There is an unfortunate effect that that kind of success record produces:
The judge figures that you must be guilty, or they wouldn't be charging you.
There's an old baseball story, where Rogers Hornsby (one of the greatest hitters of all time) is up, a pitch comes in, and the ump calls it a ball. The catcher turns around to complain.
The ump says "Young man, if that was a strike, Mr. Hornsby would have swung at it."
It's actually more than 99% conviction rate with some sources [1] saying 99.9%.
A great movie on the Japanese judicial system is I just didn't do it (Soredemo boku wa yattenai) [2] It's a phenomenal movie but really shows that Japan has a real issues.
Given that if I were Ghosn, I'd have escaped too, there was no way for him to get a fair trial in Japan.
The US has a lower prosecution rate because they “shoot first and ask questions later.” That is, prosecutors are more aggressive in just trying to blame someone… anyone… whether guilty or not by using plea deals. Of course conviction rate suffers because there is such a high percentage of false accusations that refuse plea bargains.
So you completely missed the case that Japan’s conviction rate is high because they may only prosecute people when there is actual evidence.
I hope he'll be thrown in prison (after a fair trial ofc) along with Do Kwon, Alex Mashinsky and all the other financial criminals we've seen pop up recently.
> This article is adapted from “Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn” by Wall Street Journal reporters Nick Kostov and Sean McLain, to be published on Aug. 9, 2022
Ghosn IS "the man". People who stick it to the man don't have access to Green Berets and private jets and multiple citizenships.
This story can be understood as bickering between two factions or groups of "the man": on the one side the Japanese legal system, hardly a champion of the underdog; and on the other, one of the world's richest and most powerful people, the sort of person who does not (cannot) arrive at his station in life without being a special type of ruthless sociopath, whether they're guilty of literal crimes or not along the way.
So like it's a highly entertaining cage match, but rooting for one or the other if you're not also part of the ownership class is kinda a coin toss.
The other side, according to Ghosn, wasn't the Japanese legal system -- it was other Nissan executives that weaponized the Japanese legal system against a foreigner. Still, I agree it's very much a case of infighting among the privileged.
I'd add that the Japanese political system was involved as well. It wasn't hard for the Nissan power players to align political support since there was already national pride and home-team loyalty at stake. The deck was definitely heavily stacked against Ghosn.
>>one of the world's richest and most powerful people, the sort of person who does not (cannot) arrive at his station in life without being a special type of ruthless sociopath
Many people who become extraordinarily successful owe their success to their integrity and competence, not to ruthlessness or sociopathy.
This is especially true in advanced economies which became advanced largely because of somewhat meritocatic hierarchies that do a decent job of incentivizing and rewarding socially beneficial behavior.
Wow, not hard to see how the next 9/11 will happen. The staff at the charter jet terminal were almost criminally clueless.
"So, how exactly does the security work around here, anyway? Is this huge crate going to be X-rayed? Because it needs to not be X-rayed. Also, here's a $10,000 tip, just to make sure you, um, don't remember us."
As far as I know the protection against "taking a jet and crashing it into a building" is a squadron of fighter jets that are quickly dispatched to (if necessary) shoot down any plane on a risky path. That's exactly what happened when some mentally unstable airport employee "stole" a plane and committed suicide by crashing it into the water after a few stunts.
The other risk would be to take passengers hostage, but in case of a chartered plane I think it's fair game to let the customer themselves decide on the level of security they need - presumably they aren't harboring any terrorists/hijackers, and I would think hijacking a private corporate flight is really low on terrorist groups' bucket lists in terms of the expected "payoff".
> As far as I know the protection against "taking a jet and crashing it into a building" is a squadron of fighter jets that are quickly dispatched to (if necessary) shoot down any plane on a risky path.
It's 16 miles from JFK airport to Manhattan. A jet plane can fly this distance in less than 5 minutes at sea level, within a normal flight envelope.
There's latency recognizing from the ground that an airliner needs to be intercepted, launching alert fighters, and getting authorization to shoot down.
Trust is involved in allowing a big container to be loaded on a plane.
Laws, including custom checks, passport checks, etc. are for regular people. There was even a recent program on NPR how different is the life of super-wealthy.
And while super-wealthy is a totally different game, even upper middle class money already distort the reality in a much more comfortable way. I'm watching a case in Santa Clara of an NVIDIA director, a Russian immigrant, who 2 years ago being drunk and speeding on I-80 hit several cars and killed a woman (all that "allegedly" as the moron does evidently have money for lawyers). It happened about the same time as a famous actor in Russia driving drunk killed a man in an accident, and that sparked my curiosity to compare how the cases would go. The Russian actor, a relatively decent human being, chose a path of a regular person and instead of applying all his star power/etc. he is already almost 2 years into his 7 years prison term. The NVIDIA director on the other hand totally lawyered up, and there have since then been uncountable motions/hearings/etc. with no sign of progress. My guess is that he will have that charade going for a long as possible - given the money he makes, the lawyers is just a minor cost of doing business for him - and if/when things start to come to an outcome he doesn't like, he would just leave the country, doesn't even need a box like Ghosn, and go back to Russia or anywhere else where no extradition treaties with US (his bail is just $275K, pretty laughable given the NVIDIA director comp).
> Laws, including custom checks, passport checks, etc. are for regular people. There was even a recent program on NPR how different is the life of super-wealthy.
Customs checks hardly affect regular people. Security checks are an optional service you can pay for, but probably won’t bother if it’s your own plane and isn’t full of hundreds of random people.
Rich people still have passport checks, they just pay the government to send the passport control people to their private terminal (which is no different than how regular privately owned commercial airports work)
It’s all exactly the same, except as a rich person you’re far more likely to be picked for a customs check.
> The NVIDIA director on the other hand totally lawyered up, and there have since then been uncountable motions/hearings/etc. with no sign of progress.
What kind of due process you get depends on your money, and that is bad. In particular people rot in jail for months and years on much smaller bails until they just take the plea deal.
And about passport checks I repeated the NPR as I have no first hand experience with private jet :)
Well there is a reason why people try so hard to get rich! If it didn't give you privileges nobody would bother.
As a child I will always remember OJ Simpson and his TEAM of lawyers.
For some reason our society needs to believe in "justice is blind" lmao.
It’s possible that the operatives knew something about Japanese customs and etiquette and the $10,000 tip was intended to distract the employees at the airport.
If they are worried about navigating a delicate social situation - rejecting the money without offense / loss of face - then they aren’t thinking about the boxes or the flimsy cover story.
The article said that this scenario - rejecting tips from uninformed foreigners - was not uncommon; but that the amount involved and what that amount implied about the potential of a future business relationship made the situation more delicate.
I think this was very likely the case. It has the feel of a magic trick —- intentionally drawing your attention to one particular point so you don’t see what they don’t want you to.
Could be. However, the risk is that if I were already the slightest bit suspicious, even subconsciously, I would go full red alert when that envelope of cash came out.
I'd (like to think I'd) bow discreetly, slip the envelope into my pocket, and excuse myself. Then I'd be on the phone to security before my office door swung closed.
lol, what’s the concern? Someone will blow up their private jet with 5 people on board? boo-hoo.
There are no hardened (or any) cockpit doors on PJs, you eat with metal cutlery and often serve yourself drinks from large glass bottles.
Want to fly a plane into a building? Anyone can get a pilots license, there are no background checks. You can just rent a plane and pull off “the next 9/11”, no amount of terminal security can solve this.
What exactly is your concern? What would better security at a private jet terminal prevent?
It’s super unusual that there were any pre-departure controls at all. I’ve never had my stuff checked while flying private, except occasionally by customs, at arrival.
> Want to fly a plane into a building? Anyone can get a pilots license, there are no background checks. You can just rent a plane and pull off “the next 9/11”, no amount of terminal security can solve this.
How are “The staff at the charter jet terminal” supposed to address this? Those are the people GP called “criminally clueless”, suggesting that the lack of pre-departure controls for private jets will cause the next 9/11.
I'm not saying that private charter flights should get the whole TSA treatment. They certainly shouldn't.
I'm just saying, when you run into some people who claim to be classical musicians but who don't look or behave anything like any musicians you've ever heard of, who are travelling on an unusual schedule with unusual luggage, who ask a lot of oddly-specific questions about security, who seem overly concerned with whether or not a large crate will get X-rayed, and who offer you large quantities of cash for unclear reasons, it's worth at least a quick ping to airport security.
Interesting, I didn't know that. Seems weird to discourage people from flagging suspicious activity. "See something, say something" doesn't mean you have to go full Stasi, just keep your eyes open and use some common sense.
1) He had essentially zero chance of being acquitted, and
2) He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:
In his shoes, I would feel morally justified in escaping. Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.
If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?
Edit. Everyone talking about hypothetical burglaries and $10 thefts from poor people: please explain what, exactly, Ghosn was accused of stealing, and from whom?
So the people stuck sorting out his mess, having to spend weeks in office going through the paperwork generated by one shell company after the other, should also file charges against him for aggravated assault?
So it is okay when we exchange captivity for money? So if we converted the money he stole into an hourly rate we could stick him into prison until the sun burns out and call it a job?
That's the calculus when you are well off and secure, which is not most people. If you steal money from someone who makes 10 an hour, you have probably stolen their rent and ability to feed themselves, not their time. Worrying about time is for people who have the basics well covered.
That’s ridiculous. A crime is a crime, and stealing money - be it physically or on paper - has real repercussions to real people. It deserves more than a financial penalty.
This is most certainly false. A crime is a violation of a law. Laws are passed by groups of people, not handed down by some infinitely wise and just being. For example, in many African nations, it is illegal to be gay. Would someone imprisoned for the "crime" of being gay be justified in escaping? Would Julian Assange be justified in escaping his dungeon for exposing the crimes of the US government?
I can't believe you would actually try this dead end argument. Let me guess, if somebody robs you tonight, they didn't commit a crime, they just violated a law that were passed by a group of people that punishes the impoverished who justified their actions.
>I can't believe you would actually try this dead end argument.
I cannot believe the stunning inability for people to understand that laws are not based on some sort of immutable, objective moral code but are invented by human beings. Do you think Harriet Tubman was a bad person because she helped those who violated the law? Would you have contacted the authorities immediately when you saw an escaped slave, due to their violation of the law?
What are you trying to get out of these debates you engage with yourself online? Find something better to do with your time and maybe you will be happier.
This is one reason why political crimes are treated with different considerations under international treaties and in the day to day norms of states. The right to asylum, for example, in one country to avoid prosecution in another country exists, and it is regularly exercised.
America regularly support people who are charged with normal crimes that have obvious political undertones, as they should. This is an unmitigated good.
Other popular examples exist. These cases are also often very polarizing for the people of the country who is claimed to have been the victim of some political crime.
What makes up a political crime? By definition it can be subjective but some entire categories are usually included.
On the one hand, Assange is considered by many to be a journalist doing journalistic things, while others argue he committed espionage doing political things as some kind of spy. Prosecution for either is usually considered a political persecution worthy of asylum.
Ecuador granted Assange political asylum because of the U.S. investigation into Assange for his publications that were in the public interest.
I disagree about financial crimes deserving (only) financial penalties, but I think you're broadly right. It's all but impossible for a native to get a fair trial in Japan, let alone a foreigner...
Nah. Financial crimes cause real harm. And financial penalties frequently aren't sufficient disincentive.
Imagine that I have no assets but am a good talker. So I go out an launch an "investment fund" that is just a Ponzi scheme. Let's suppose I take in $50m, pocket $10m, and spend the rest on "investment returns" and appearing to run a real business. I live high on the hog for 5 years before it all falls apart, at which point many too-trusting people have lost their lifes' savings. What is the correct penalty?
There's no way a financial penalty can be correct here because all of my money was stolen. If the government just sets me back the zero I started at, what punishment is that? Where's my disincentive to do it all again?
If anything, I'd argue financial crimes are more likely to deserve jail time. People who steal food may be doing it out of necessity. But nobody stealing millions through financial crimes can claim desperation. I don't think people who use suits to rob instead of ski masks are any less thieves.
I’d imagine the penalty at least involves returning any stolen money, but a garnishment on future income and additional IRS scrutiny should do it.
I actually think jail time isn’t enough a disincentive without the financial penalty because otherwise it can just be a cost of doing business.
For example there was a chronic thief in SF that stole peoples’ laptops from cafes. She was jailed multiple times but because the police had no way of knowing where she hid the stolen goods they were still never recovered and presumably she kept her earnings even after jail time.
There's a legal expression (it's in French originally) that says
"You can't get blood from a stone"
This effectively means financial crimes can never be repaid in full, and frequently only small percentages get repaid. It also means the government can never hope to actually do anything to help other than punishment.
Going after financial crimes to protect victims ... just doesn't work.
Somehow this is enormously at odds with people's expectation of justice, and people either just can't or refuse to believe that's really how it works.
> at which point many too-trusting people have lost their lifes' savings
People should be a little smarter and not fall for Ponzi schemes. Furthermore, many people who invest in such schemes, understand how they work but hope to get profit before it collapses.
> People should be a little smarter and not fall for Ponzi schemes
Blaming the victims is not a solution.
This logic can be applied to justify stopping punishing any crime (“well, they should have stayed at home if they did not want to get mugged”, “they should know better than leave their house for the week if they did not want to get burglarised”, etc).
The victim-perpetrator binary is a false dilemma. Courts recognize contributory negligence in car accidents, why shouldn't they recognize them for self-inflicted financial harms in which one was aware or should have been aware of the risks?
I'm assuming you are actually a troll, or maybe you haven't actually looked beyond the headline. Many "schemes" are very legitimate looking, offering modest returns. At the moment with very low bank deposit even a 10% investment fund is attractive. Also vulnerable often cannot distinguish good will from good acting by purveyors.
Just recently it has come to light that a crooked funeral fund here in Australia has been preying on indigenous people for years with no prospect on their deposits being returned
I don't think you understand how scams work. They're engineered so that somebody will fall for them. If we made everybody 10% smarter, scammers would just make their scams 10% cleverer.
I also think a linear "smartness" model misses it. Both intelligence and knowledge are multidimensional. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses, and well-run scams target particular weaknesses.
Rape and murder are extreme crimes and of course no financial loss is equal to them but there are other violent crimes that have less of an impact compared to losing money.
You might be thinking about someone stealing a person's TV but what about their life savings. What about a corporation that goes bankrupt because of financial misdeeds and people lose their jobs? My dad lost his job in the mid 90s and the effects on my family involved massive stress for years.
Financial concerns/economy seems to be the most important issue to voters in almost every election ever.
It can also can result in physical issues. Maybe you can't afford healthy food, maybe you can't afford health care due to financial loss.
I couldn't find statistics but I can't imagine that in cases of theft being repaid 100% or even 50% of your loss occurs that frequency (but no source so..)
In other words some financial crimes are worse than violent crimes.
I agree with your conclusion. Google News has correctly decided I'm interested in Ponzi schemes, so it shows me articles at least weekly about newly discovered large ones. A very common element is people retired or on their way who have lost everything. I'd much rather get a punch in the snoot than to spend years slowly dying of stress, poor nutrition, and patchy medical care.
Are those the only crimes that involve jail time you can think of?
We spent half a century sending people to jail for years or decades for possessing a bit of marijuana. You can be sent to jail for non-payment of speeding fines, or fishing at the wrong time of year. Or peacefully protesting government policies.
> Being raped, assaulted or having a family member murdered is worse than losing money
Violent and financial/corruption crimes are in categories to themselves.
The former for obvious reasons. The latter, because they corrode the institutions that make civilization work. Let financial crime--specifically corruption--run rampant and you'll lose more lives to riots, civil war or worse than to murder.
It's no secret that car factories in peacetime make good tanks in war. Also, in peacetime, they employ many voters and their families. Ghosn was an immensely powerful man. He used his influence for personal enrichment. Enrichment his family collaborated to defend. Kings' courtiers had strict punishments for disloyalty for a reason. Much of that was personal. But some tied to the integrity of the state.
We cannot excuse multimillionaires from running from the law while claiming to have a just society just because they had good PR. Ghosn, and his family [1], must be held accountable.
[1] his son, Anthony Ghosn, facilitated the escape [a] as did his daughter, Maya Ghosn, who is profiled in the article
Well if you're going to go to the extreme, how about treason?
Let's say you sell military secrets to an enemy that results in nuclear destruction of your country and deaths of millions of people. The act of exchanging that secret for money was nothing more than moving some bits around on the internet, certainly non violent itself. Would you retain this strange protection from responsibility for consequences of your action in this case as well?
Money often represents opportunity, sometimes its lack can cause significant distress. Say you want to go on vacation but find that all your bank accounts are in the red, you are not going to make that vacation, instead you are probably going to spend significant amounts of time trying to fix the resulting issues. Someone dropping by years later with a few million in hand isn't going to give you those years of your life back.
Financial crimes, aka crimes rich people commit, to be richer, deserve much more harsh treatment that we give them today. You can go to jail for years for shoplifting (aka crimes poor people commit) few thousand dollars worth of goods. People should be much more often sentenced to go to jail for life for committing millions of dollars worth of financial crimes.
A home burglary where no one's present is non violent. Do you think that should be punished lightly? It causes orders of magnitude less damage than a lot of financial crime.
> Burglary is a crime under both the common law and the model penal code. Exact definitions of burglary under the common law vary by jurisdiction though they all criminalize some form of illegally entering a building at night with the intent to commit a crime within.
Typically this means you've broken into a domicile (sometimes lesser charges of Burglary exist for non-domicile, eg a vacant commercial building). If you break into someone's home, at night, while it's occupied, the law presumes you intended to do violence.
If you're a rational criminal, you might think along these lines:
* I am considering committing a crime that is worth X to me.
* The price (punishment) for this crime is Y.
* I only have to pay the price if I'm caught and convicted, both of which have some probability between 0 and 1.
So the effective price for committing this crime is Y multiplied by the probability I'm caught and convicted.
If
X > P(caught) * P(convicted) * Y
Then I should commit the crime. Otherwise, it's not worth it.
For financial crimes, it's safe to say that P(caught) and P(convicted) get lower and lower the richer and more powerful you become. You have access to the best accountants and attorneys, making certain financial crime reliably profitable and increasingly attractive.
Therefore it stands to reason that while there is a line past which a punishment becomes excessive, an effective punishment must lead would-be criminals to decide that the risk is not worth it. Until this is the case, we have to either increase P(caught & convicted), or else increase Y; we can't do neither.
Probably increasing both is best; an increase in fines (Y) could fund the increased enforcement (P) necessary. Good luck passing those laws, though.
Register theft also occurs so does stealing from the common tipjar. It's not always 10s of millions, often it's thousand per year that people siphon off. It's till financial crimes.
Point me to a single person in California jail for 9 years for possession of under 1 gram of weed. CA legalized weed and then went the extra mile (which many states haven't) to expunge existing convictions and for people being punished currently, downgrading most felony possession counts to misdemeanors and reducing/dismissing the rest of the charges;
When was the last prosecution in California? Are there any people in jail today for the crime? What was the average sentence of the 6 people per year who went to prison while Harris was DA? What crime were those people convicted of and what quantity of drugs did it involve? Do you think Chesa was inappropriately lenient in choosing not to prosecute crimes? The tack of your supposed argument let’s me know plenty enough that I’m not remotely interesting in continuing this conversation.
You ask five questions and then say you're not interested in continuing this conversation. And then you bring up Chesa, whom no one's mentioned at all. Cute.
"He had essentially zero chance of being acquitted" - So if I commit a crime it's morally acceptable to flee justice if the probability or evidence exceeds a certain threshold? In other words, the more proof there is that I committed a crime gives me more justification to avoid punishment?
"He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:" Prove it.
"If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?" - They aren't related cases with completely different circumstances and crimes. It also doesn't matter.
> He had essentially zero chance of being acquitted
I think GP was referring to the fact that Japan has an over 99% conviction rate.
Even if we presume that Japan has unusually high quality prosecutors and judges, that rate is so high that I think it’s reasonable to presume a fair number of innocent people are getting convicted (which happens lots of places, of course, but Japan’s conviction rate is still unusual).
There is another factor to it - not trying cases which aren't certain victories as joining that 1% of the conviction rate is an extremely shameful failure. The conviction rate is a "smell" regardless of how you slice it.
"Scholars say the biggest reason for Japan's very high conviction rate is the country's low prosecution rate and the way Japan calculates its conviction rate is different from other countries.[2][3][4] According to them, Japanese prosecutors will prosecute only the very few cases in which they are most likely to be guilty and not many others."
The 99% rate is NOT because the system (prosecutors, judges) is "good", the rate is so high because system is structured to bully anyone arrested to admit to the crimes. You're basically coerced into confession, whether or not you did it.
> He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:
Largely agree.
> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.
That's a very old aristocratic view of financial "wrong-doing", still persists somewhat these days because the idea that for "people with money" with a good reputation, being condemned in public and losing their good name is already a penalty big enough.
That's... let's just say this line of thinking should stay in the past.
> please explain what, exactly, Ghosn was accused of stealing, and from whom?
Should every company executive be free to steal millions of dollars from their companies [1][2]? Be free to "renovate homes for Ghosn in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Paris and Amsterdam" on pensioners' dimes? Get a free pass from investigation by multiple countries [3] because they ran a PR campaign while they were pillaging?
Anyone informed defending Ghosn is essentially rejecting the rule of law, full stop. He's wanted for serious crimes in multiple countries with discordant agendas.
So you just admitted that all the hypotheticals about victims in poverty and $10 thefts are nonsense. He took millions from Nissan and Renault, neither of whom are exactly widows and orphans.
And they were all quite happy to go along with it, for a long, long time. Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?
> hypotheticals about victims in poverty and $10 thefts are nonsense
Hypotheticals, sure. I’m not familiar with his every crime. Just the big ones.
> Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?
It sounds like the answer to the above questions, for you, is yes. Fraud. Embezzlement. All okay, because the ultimate victims, the shareholders, either didn’t push back better or were further defrauded by a possibly corrupt, possibly incompetent Board. We can’t know either way because the guy up and offed to Beirut, where he sits a fugitive of multiple international arrest warrants.
> people in charge of controlling him, the people whose job it is to supervise him, didn't
Sure. I made an analogy to Enron elsewhere.
But their incompetence, potentially collusion, doesn’t excuse Ghosn. And the path to holding them responsible is through him. The flip side of this, also unexplored, is that people with skeletons in their closets don't tend to hide them alone. Who else is complicit? Who among them was blackmailed, and which decisions were unduly influenced by that?
You can apply that logic towards a variety of other crimes: the principal who doesn't properly supervise the teacher who beats students, the police chief who doesn't properly supervise the officers who form their own drug running gang. There's usually someone else you can blame besides the people who commit the immediate crime; there's always someone if you find creative ways to blame the victims. Most people grow out of thinking this way, though.
It doesn't make you a monster if you just happen to admire a criminal. That's human nature; people have admired all sorts of criminals, especially stylish ones who get away with things. There's a whole film genre about them.
But, like, if we're going to discuss them on a message board, we should probably be clear about the fact that Danny Ocean and his gang deserve to be --- in fact, really kind of need to be --- in prison.
Ignoring all that - if I were in his shoes I’d do the same - guilty or innocent.
I mean, even if I wasn’t in his billionaire shoes I’d do the same - if facing a long imprisonment in a foreign country I’d take chance at escaping any day.
1) not sure this is really relevant. If you don't trust the country's laws you are doing business in dont do business there. Part of the reason I dont plan on opening a factory in Liberia is because i wouldnt trust their legal system to protect me. Im happy working in USA even though their legal system shares suspicious statistics with Japan.
The Feds in USA have a 97% guilty rate, so this same logic could be used basically saying because defendants in federal USA trials have virtually no chance of getting off scott free they can escape and we shouldnt call that injustice.
The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' conviction rate would be 99.8%."
And he has since had to settle a massive fraud charge from the US SEC and is the subject of an arrest warrant from France now too. Bit hard to just dismiss the whole thing as being due to racist authoritarian Japan.
2) What was he a victim of? There are allegations and counter allegations, why should he have the presumption of innocence but not these "Nissan executives"?
> In his shoes, I would feel morally justified in escaping.
I'm guessing most CEO types would feel moral in personally deciding the punishment for their crimes is unfair and therefore they are justified in committing more crimes to get away with their earlier crimes...
> If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?
An emotionally charged question because of the situation now, but there are many who get "unfair" sentences for drugs all over the world including people jailed in Russia for similar crimes, people executed in South East Asia and the Middle East for drugs, and people locked away in the US for years on non violent crimes based on legislation and prosecutions orchestrated by the likes of President Biden and Vice President Harris.
Not that you can't be against all of those things, but it's a pretty huge crutch that seems to be trying to equate Japan's justice system with Russia's, and harsh penalties for personal drug use with the often very lenient punishments for fraud and embezzlement. "If you aren't with Ghosn then you're with Putin" is a bridge too far.
> Edit. Everyone talking about hypothetical burglaries and $10 thefts from poor people: please explain what, exactly, Ghosn was accused of stealing, and from whom?
Some millions of dollars. From company shareholders.
It makes you wonder how hard it would be for someone in the US to do the same... Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where a prominent wealthy person was indicted for some random federal crime, say 18 U.S.C. § 372 or 2384, etc. I'd bet they wouldn't need to hide in a box to flee to a country without an extradition agreement, like Russia for example.
One would hope we'd be able to prevent something like that, but it's a big country.
Doesn't the lid get pulled off every couple years and then nothing? I feel I read about a few cases over the decades. Somehow Nintendo and Anime seem to overpower that quite well. ;-)
Yeah my brother had a child with his Japanese wife last year, and she became very unwell mentally post-partum, but won't seek treatment. He's desperately unhappy, but he has to stay in the marriage, as he has no chance in hell of seeing his son if he leaves, foreign spouses never win a custody dispute in Japanese courts, and Japan does not do shared custody.
I think something similar happened go some youtuber (google Tech lead guy on youtube) where his wife who is Japanese took their (I think American) child to Japan and now he cannot even see his child.
I remember the dude and remembered him mentioning trouble with his wife and kid.
How can a parent take a kid out of the country without the consent of the other parent without it being categorized as kidnapping. Being that the kid is an American citizen can't the U.S. system get Japan to send this kid back(if the mother is only Japanese and not the kid).
Didn't America extradite the Americans involved in Ghosen's escape? So they should have agreements this such legal matters to no?
P.s. I really didn't agree with American extraditing it's citizen in Goshen's case.
This is indeed a big issue with international marriages. The solution I thought of (because I was living in Japan for few years, so may someday get stuck in a similar situation) would be to steal the kid before she does, like using holidays abroad, or even just like taking a fly with the kid after school or something. Basically boils down to firing first. Risky if the spouse find it, and of course that mean leaving a lot of things (possibly financial assets) behind.
That's the problem, he's not that kind of guy. And no-one really thinks about these things, e.g., "what if my partner develops post-partum psychosis in a jurisdiction hostile to people not from that jurisdiction" when falling in love.
In a closely similar situation, I went for counseling personally. It helped me understand where she's coming from and stick it out. You can never judge other people, but marriages have their lows and it's worth fighting for them -- at least more often than pop culture and individualist mores ("get out, it's getting you down") would have you believe.
And I mean, you will have your cross to bear eventually. That's life.
He's in counselling, but to handle being the subject of her rages and paranoia. Post-partum psychosis isn't really something you can understand their viewpoint on.
She really needs professional assistance but won't seek it, and her family have been slow to move her towards doing so, as her Dad is a prominent religious official in their small town, and there's some shame in having an unwell daughter.
But, recently they've acknowledged that there is something that needs treatment and have been gradually approaching it, which gives my brother hope. He loves her, of course, but there's marriages worth fighting for, and marriages where you're being abused. Currently, his is the latter.
he was a genius in automotive management, turned around south american division of michelin in less than 2 years. saved Nissan from bankrupcy in few years by cost cutting everything that wasnt extremely necessary, throwed away alls "zaibatsu culture things" and promoted by skill not "age". he really went against japanese corporate norms.[0]
> he just simply stole money into his personal accounts?
Yup! (I mean, it went to subsidiaries for pay his family and his own entities. Or was laundered to pay for a party at Versailles. Fairly standard stuff.)
A popular narrative is that the choice is between Ghosn being guilty or a victim of a Nissan management coup d'etat.
This is a false dichotomy, it is also quite possible that illicit activity by Ghosn provided convenient ammunition to people with incentive to have him removed.
People pushing the binary narrative focus on how the Japanese prosecution seems over the top for what is essentially a financial reporting law violation. However, the reporting issues are only two of the allegations.
The other two seem more serious, breach of trust in getting Nissan to cover collateral for FX losses, and misappropriation of funds in which $15 million was sent to a Nissan dealership, a portion of which was then transferred to a company controlled by Ghosn.
Adding to these the French arrest warrant on charges of money laundering and abuse of company assets, which seem to include misuse of company funds to allegedly pay for a lavish personal party at Versailles, one must wonder if online Ghosn supporters are organic or reputation management staff.
This is hilarious. All the money in the word and rich peoples’ best parties are worse than practically every 20 year old’s in their parents suburban house.
Asiatimes.com had a 4 part series on Ghosn. BusinessInsider as well iirc did a piece on him. Both are damning of Nissan and Japanese legal system. A related story also not broadcast loudly is that of an American lawyer that also got a taste of Japanese jails.
Ghosn is very credible here, if unlike WSJ, you wish to consider the facts. "[I]t is quite possible" is not factual matter.
This story involves industrial policy and interests of at least two major powers: France and Japan. In that scale of matters, Ghosn is a little guy. Good for him for escaping what sounds like hell.
I was in Japan in early 2019, just around the time he released a statement that was aired on TV. I have to say, Ghosn is very charming; he makes you want to believe every word he says.
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[ 880 ms ] story [ 5372 ms ] threadConveniently, he cannot stand trial in France, which has also called for his arrest based on their own investigations, because he chose to become an international fugitive in Lebanon [1].
That said, I believe there has been prosecutorial interest around Anthony Ghosn--Carlos's son living in, to my last recollection, California--due to payments he made to the Taylors [2]. (The daughter, Maya, who is profiled in the article helping him escape is also in California, though there is no interest in charging her to my knowledge.)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/france-issues-international-arr...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nissan-ghosn-taylor-bail-...
I know the tech scene tends to fawn over Japanese culture, but business and government there lean conservative like every other nation state right now. My experience is that it’s 100% possible some xenophobes within industry have a very “Brexit-like” mentality about their nation and the fear of Renault-Nissan culture clash was leveraged to trump up charges.
Note I said it’s possible. Ultimately none of us really know, but the Japanese are “just people” too. No reason to believe they’re aren’t pulling an “Assange” like the west.
(Without getting into value judgments about the merits of the case,) this quote from Leo McGarry comes to mind:
> Well, that's why he did it. You can't fault him for having a winning strategy.
http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTransc...
A lot of the accusations are for standard rich people crimes which is some amount of tax avoidance. You can basically pick and choose who you want to target because as panama papers shows pretty much all rich people are dodging taxes to some degree.
Still doesn't change the fact that Interpol has a red notice for Ghosn.
That said, not being him, I really don't like the narrative built around how Japanese prisons are horrible and it's justified to not serve for crimes in Japan. I also wonder if the "Japanese prisons and legal system are not good" editorials were coordinated.
IMHO, if Japanese system is that bad, People should stop going to Japan or take action to fix it for everyone instead of normalising the getting of scott-free for the elite.
Uh, yes it is. Maybe if you’re imprisoned illegally (kidnapping or by kangaroo court) but in the general case—in a democracy with actual courts, it’s wrong.
You think the cartel bosses that escaped from Mexico’s prisons were not morally and ethically wrong on multiple levels? Just because there’s also some corruption in the gov? Or because the prisons aren’t great. That’s unreasonable
That should not be confused with the crimes being wrong, I'm talking about ones desire not to be imprisoned being a natural desire and acting on it not being wrong by itself.
Michael Taylor. Mr. Taylor pleaded guilty to aiding Mr. Ghosn’s escape and started a two-year sentence at Tokyo’s Fuchu Prison in the summer of 2021; he spends much of his day in solitary confinement.
Either way, the person I was responding to did not say it was a natural desire, they only said it was “not wrong”.
To quote Wikipedia "In some other places like Germany and a number of other countries, it is considered human nature to want to escape from a prison and it is considered as a violation of the right of freedom, so escape is not penalized in itself (in the absence of other factors such as threats of violence, actual violence, or property damage)."
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_escape
So I can't say I wouldn't have done the same as Ghosn, given the necessary resources. Right or wrong wouldn't be a consideration, as long as I could rationalize an assumption of bad faith on the courts' part.
Edit: I guess it could also suggest that the police in Japan are hopeless fuckups who only manage to catch the most flagrantly-incompetent criminals. That doesn't sound any more realistic than the other possibilities IMO.
They alternative, where prosecutors lose so many cases that their win rate goes down into the 70's or 60's, implies that prosecutors are taking lots of flyers just see how the cases shake out. That would be a tremendous abuse.
The staff of prosecutors is much smaller in Japan, so it likely means they mostly prosecute the winnable cases. In contrast in the US, a district attorney might choose to prosecute cases which make themself more electable.
But - FWIW - prosecutors in the US tend to have win rates north of 90% as well. 98% is excessively high, yes, but we're talking single digit percentages compared to a country with comparatively more crime.
The judge figures that you must be guilty, or they wouldn't be charging you.
There's an old baseball story, where Rogers Hornsby (one of the greatest hitters of all time) is up, a pitch comes in, and the ump calls it a ball. The catcher turns around to complain.
The ump says "Young man, if that was a strike, Mr. Hornsby would have swung at it."
A great movie on the Japanese judicial system is I just didn't do it (Soredemo boku wa yattenai) [2] It's a phenomenal movie but really shows that Japan has a real issues.
Given that if I were Ghosn, I'd have escaped too, there was no way for him to get a fair trial in Japan.
[1] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/c05401/order-in-the-c... [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0794350/
So you completely missed the case that Japan’s conviction rate is high because they may only prosecute people when there is actual evidence.
> This article is adapted from “Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn” by Wall Street Journal reporters Nick Kostov and Sean McLain, to be published on Aug. 9, 2022
This story can be understood as bickering between two factions or groups of "the man": on the one side the Japanese legal system, hardly a champion of the underdog; and on the other, one of the world's richest and most powerful people, the sort of person who does not (cannot) arrive at his station in life without being a special type of ruthless sociopath, whether they're guilty of literal crimes or not along the way.
So like it's a highly entertaining cage match, but rooting for one or the other if you're not also part of the ownership class is kinda a coin toss.
Many people who become extraordinarily successful owe their success to their integrity and competence, not to ruthlessness or sociopathy.
This is especially true in advanced economies which became advanced largely because of somewhat meritocatic hierarchies that do a decent job of incentivizing and rewarding socially beneficial behavior.
"So, how exactly does the security work around here, anyway? Is this huge crate going to be X-rayed? Because it needs to not be X-rayed. Also, here's a $10,000 tip, just to make sure you, um, don't remember us."
As far as I know the protection against "taking a jet and crashing it into a building" is a squadron of fighter jets that are quickly dispatched to (if necessary) shoot down any plane on a risky path. That's exactly what happened when some mentally unstable airport employee "stole" a plane and committed suicide by crashing it into the water after a few stunts.
The other risk would be to take passengers hostage, but in case of a chartered plane I think it's fair game to let the customer themselves decide on the level of security they need - presumably they aren't harboring any terrorists/hijackers, and I would think hijacking a private corporate flight is really low on terrorist groups' bucket lists in terms of the expected "payoff".
It's 16 miles from JFK airport to Manhattan. A jet plane can fly this distance in less than 5 minutes at sea level, within a normal flight envelope.
There's latency recognizing from the ground that an airliner needs to be intercepted, launching alert fighters, and getting authorization to shoot down.
Trust is involved in allowing a big container to be loaded on a plane.
And while super-wealthy is a totally different game, even upper middle class money already distort the reality in a much more comfortable way. I'm watching a case in Santa Clara of an NVIDIA director, a Russian immigrant, who 2 years ago being drunk and speeding on I-80 hit several cars and killed a woman (all that "allegedly" as the moron does evidently have money for lawyers). It happened about the same time as a famous actor in Russia driving drunk killed a man in an accident, and that sparked my curiosity to compare how the cases would go. The Russian actor, a relatively decent human being, chose a path of a regular person and instead of applying all his star power/etc. he is already almost 2 years into his 7 years prison term. The NVIDIA director on the other hand totally lawyered up, and there have since then been uncountable motions/hearings/etc. with no sign of progress. My guess is that he will have that charade going for a long as possible - given the money he makes, the lawyers is just a minor cost of doing business for him - and if/when things start to come to an outcome he doesn't like, he would just leave the country, doesn't even need a box like Ghosn, and go back to Russia or anywhere else where no extradition treaties with US (his bail is just $275K, pretty laughable given the NVIDIA director comp).
I don’t know about the this. Money and fame didn’t save Phil Spector and it won’t save him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spector
Customs checks hardly affect regular people. Security checks are an optional service you can pay for, but probably won’t bother if it’s your own plane and isn’t full of hundreds of random people. Rich people still have passport checks, they just pay the government to send the passport control people to their private terminal (which is no different than how regular privately owned commercial airports work)
It’s all exactly the same, except as a rich person you’re far more likely to be picked for a customs check.
> The NVIDIA director on the other hand totally lawyered up, and there have since then been uncountable motions/hearings/etc. with no sign of progress.
due process bad!
And about passport checks I repeated the NPR as I have no first hand experience with private jet :)
For some reason our society needs to believe in "justice is blind" lmao.
Link?
If they are worried about navigating a delicate social situation - rejecting the money without offense / loss of face - then they aren’t thinking about the boxes or the flimsy cover story.
The article said that this scenario - rejecting tips from uninformed foreigners - was not uncommon; but that the amount involved and what that amount implied about the potential of a future business relationship made the situation more delicate.
I'd (like to think I'd) bow discreetly, slip the envelope into my pocket, and excuse myself. Then I'd be on the phone to security before my office door swung closed.
There are no hardened (or any) cockpit doors on PJs, you eat with metal cutlery and often serve yourself drinks from large glass bottles.
Want to fly a plane into a building? Anyone can get a pilots license, there are no background checks. You can just rent a plane and pull off “the next 9/11”, no amount of terminal security can solve this.
What exactly is your concern? What would better security at a private jet terminal prevent?
It’s super unusual that there were any pre-departure controls at all. I’ve never had my stuff checked while flying private, except occasionally by customs, at arrival.
Yes, those are concerns.
And if you need a background check for a HAM radio license, it makes sense to have a background check for pilot licenses.
What will that achieve? How many terror attacks have there been on board private planes?
> And if you need a background check for a HAM radio license, it makes sense to have a background check for pilot licenses.
An useful background check would be something more akin to a security clearance, not like a HAM radio license.
Why do we still check those? Whatever checking private planes would achieve.
Maybe that's nothing, but annoying safety/security measures need to be all or nothing. No exemptions.
2. You didn't understand re: HAM radio, you have to report your felonies for a HAM radio license and that gets reviewed, in USA anyway: http://www.arrl.org/fcc-qualification-question
Regular passenger flights often contain hundreds of random people, private jets don’t. It’s downright idiotic to equate these.
> 2. You didn't understand re: HAM radio, you have to report your felonies for a HAM radio license and that gets reviewed, in USA anyway
I did understand.
I'm just saying, when you run into some people who claim to be classical musicians but who don't look or behave anything like any musicians you've ever heard of, who are travelling on an unusual schedule with unusual luggage, who ask a lot of oddly-specific questions about security, who seem overly concerned with whether or not a large crate will get X-rayed, and who offer you large quantities of cash for unclear reasons, it's worth at least a quick ping to airport security.
“airport security” generally doesn’t show up for free, it’s a paid service.
1) He had essentially zero chance of being acquitted, and
2) He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:
In his shoes, I would feel morally justified in escaping. Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.
If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?
Edit. Everyone talking about hypothetical burglaries and $10 thefts from poor people: please explain what, exactly, Ghosn was accused of stealing, and from whom?
Can you explain this one?
Do you believe violent crimes require a violent penalty?
It’s certainly a common belief, imprisoning someone is inherently a violent penalty.
In many cases, yes.
I'm not sure what you mean by it, can you please give an example?
For most people, money represents the time out of their lives it took to earn it.
If you steal $10 from someone, and they earned it from a job that pays $10/hour - you didn't steal $10, you stole an hour of their life.
This is most certainly false. A crime is a violation of a law. Laws are passed by groups of people, not handed down by some infinitely wise and just being. For example, in many African nations, it is illegal to be gay. Would someone imprisoned for the "crime" of being gay be justified in escaping? Would Julian Assange be justified in escaping his dungeon for exposing the crimes of the US government?
I cannot believe the stunning inability for people to understand that laws are not based on some sort of immutable, objective moral code but are invented by human beings. Do you think Harriet Tubman was a bad person because she helped those who violated the law? Would you have contacted the authorities immediately when you saw an escaped slave, due to their violation of the law?
America regularly support people who are charged with normal crimes that have obvious political undertones, as they should. This is an unmitigated good.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Guangcheng
Other popular examples exist. These cases are also often very polarizing for the people of the country who is claimed to have been the victim of some political crime.
Note the definition of political crime ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/political%20crime ) exactly makes the link: “political offenses … exclude any possibility of extradition.”
What makes up a political crime? By definition it can be subjective but some entire categories are usually included.
On the one hand, Assange is considered by many to be a journalist doing journalistic things, while others argue he committed espionage doing political things as some kind of spy. Prosecution for either is usually considered a political persecution worthy of asylum.
Ecuador granted Assange political asylum because of the U.S. investigation into Assange for his publications that were in the public interest.
Nah. Financial crimes cause real harm. And financial penalties frequently aren't sufficient disincentive.
Imagine that I have no assets but am a good talker. So I go out an launch an "investment fund" that is just a Ponzi scheme. Let's suppose I take in $50m, pocket $10m, and spend the rest on "investment returns" and appearing to run a real business. I live high on the hog for 5 years before it all falls apart, at which point many too-trusting people have lost their lifes' savings. What is the correct penalty?
There's no way a financial penalty can be correct here because all of my money was stolen. If the government just sets me back the zero I started at, what punishment is that? Where's my disincentive to do it all again?
If anything, I'd argue financial crimes are more likely to deserve jail time. People who steal food may be doing it out of necessity. But nobody stealing millions through financial crimes can claim desperation. I don't think people who use suits to rob instead of ski masks are any less thieves.
I actually think jail time isn’t enough a disincentive without the financial penalty because otherwise it can just be a cost of doing business.
For example there was a chronic thief in SF that stole peoples’ laptops from cafes. She was jailed multiple times but because the police had no way of knowing where she hid the stolen goods they were still never recovered and presumably she kept her earnings even after jail time.
"You can't get blood from a stone"
This effectively means financial crimes can never be repaid in full, and frequently only small percentages get repaid. It also means the government can never hope to actually do anything to help other than punishment.
Going after financial crimes to protect victims ... just doesn't work.
Somehow this is enormously at odds with people's expectation of justice, and people either just can't or refuse to believe that's really how it works.
People should be a little smarter and not fall for Ponzi schemes. Furthermore, many people who invest in such schemes, understand how they work but hope to get profit before it collapses.
Blaming the victims is not a solution.
This logic can be applied to justify stopping punishing any crime (“well, they should have stayed at home if they did not want to get mugged”, “they should know better than leave their house for the week if they did not want to get burglarised”, etc).
Just recently it has come to light that a crooked funeral fund here in Australia has been preying on indigenous people for years with no prospect on their deposits being returned
I also think a linear "smartness" model misses it. Both intelligence and knowledge are multidimensional. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses, and well-run scams target particular weaknesses.
Money can be repaid. You can't be unraped.
You might be thinking about someone stealing a person's TV but what about their life savings. What about a corporation that goes bankrupt because of financial misdeeds and people lose their jobs? My dad lost his job in the mid 90s and the effects on my family involved massive stress for years.
Financial concerns/economy seems to be the most important issue to voters in almost every election ever.
It's the 5th highest reason for divorce at 36% (https://www.insider.com/why-people-get-divorced-2019-1)
It can also can result in physical issues. Maybe you can't afford healthy food, maybe you can't afford health care due to financial loss.
I couldn't find statistics but I can't imagine that in cases of theft being repaid 100% or even 50% of your loss occurs that frequency (but no source so..)
In other words some financial crimes are worse than violent crimes.
We spent half a century sending people to jail for years or decades for possessing a bit of marijuana. You can be sent to jail for non-payment of speeding fines, or fishing at the wrong time of year. Or peacefully protesting government policies.
Violent and financial/corruption crimes are in categories to themselves.
The former for obvious reasons. The latter, because they corrode the institutions that make civilization work. Let financial crime--specifically corruption--run rampant and you'll lose more lives to riots, civil war or worse than to murder.
It's no secret that car factories in peacetime make good tanks in war. Also, in peacetime, they employ many voters and their families. Ghosn was an immensely powerful man. He used his influence for personal enrichment. Enrichment his family collaborated to defend. Kings' courtiers had strict punishments for disloyalty for a reason. Much of that was personal. But some tied to the integrity of the state.
We cannot excuse multimillionaires from running from the law while claiming to have a just society just because they had good PR. Ghosn, and his family [1], must be held accountable.
[1] his son, Anthony Ghosn, facilitated the escape [a] as did his daughter, Maya Ghosn, who is profiled in the article
[a] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nissan-ghosn-taylor-bail-...
Let's say you sell military secrets to an enemy that results in nuclear destruction of your country and deaths of millions of people. The act of exchanging that secret for money was nothing more than moving some bits around on the internet, certainly non violent itself. Would you retain this strange protection from responsibility for consequences of your action in this case as well?
Financial crimes, aka crimes rich people commit, to be richer, deserve much more harsh treatment that we give them today. You can go to jail for years for shoplifting (aka crimes poor people commit) few thousand dollars worth of goods. People should be much more often sentenced to go to jail for life for committing millions of dollars worth of financial crimes.
A home burglary where no one's present is non violent. Do you think that should be punished lightly? It causes orders of magnitude less damage than a lot of financial crime.
From https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burglary
Typically this means you've broken into a domicile (sometimes lesser charges of Burglary exist for non-domicile, eg a vacant commercial building). If you break into someone's home, at night, while it's occupied, the law presumes you intended to do violence.
This presumption is usually correct!
Well yes. But I explicitly said "no one's present". And it usually happens during the day where I live, because that's when people work.
Someone stealing my life savings will have a much greater impact than someone punching me in the face.
* I am considering committing a crime that is worth X to me.
* The price (punishment) for this crime is Y.
* I only have to pay the price if I'm caught and convicted, both of which have some probability between 0 and 1.
So the effective price for committing this crime is Y multiplied by the probability I'm caught and convicted.
If
Then I should commit the crime. Otherwise, it's not worth it.For financial crimes, it's safe to say that P(caught) and P(convicted) get lower and lower the richer and more powerful you become. You have access to the best accountants and attorneys, making certain financial crime reliably profitable and increasingly attractive.
Therefore it stands to reason that while there is a line past which a punishment becomes excessive, an effective punishment must lead would-be criminals to decide that the risk is not worth it. Until this is the case, we have to either increase P(caught & convicted), or else increase Y; we can't do neither.
Probably increasing both is best; an increase in fines (Y) could fund the increased enforcement (P) necessary. Good luck passing those laws, though.
https://www.pubdef.ocgov.com/programs/dismissal-and-re-sente...
"only a few dozen people were sent to state prison for marijuana convictions under Harris’ tenure." https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/11/kamala-harris-prosecu...
"He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:" Prove it.
"If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?" - They aren't related cases with completely different circumstances and crimes. It also doesn't matter.
To bad Britney Griner doesn't have the $15 million~ that Ghosen needed to escape. https://fortune.com/2020/01/10/carlos-ghosn-net-worth-2020-f...
Oh, sure. Like underhanded whisper campaigns and unspoken agreements are susceptible to "proof."
I think GP was referring to the fact that Japan has an over 99% conviction rate.
Even if we presume that Japan has unusually high quality prosecutors and judges, that rate is so high that I think it’s reasonable to presume a fair number of innocent people are getting convicted (which happens lots of places, of course, but Japan’s conviction rate is still unusual).
https://web.archive.org/web/20220712033655/https://www.nippo...
I don't think it's reasonable to assume anything happens if there's an alternative explanation.
What percentage of convictions are accompanied by confessions?
I don't know the answer to that, actually.
Eyeball related crimes deserve an eyeball-related penalty, car crimes deserve a car penalty, gun crimes deserve a gun penalty.
I mean, really. Did you even try to think of one counter-example to your claim before you wrote it?
Largely agree.
> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.
That's a very old aristocratic view of financial "wrong-doing", still persists somewhat these days because the idea that for "people with money" with a good reputation, being condemned in public and losing their good name is already a penalty big enough.
That's... let's just say this line of thinking should stay in the past.
Should every company executive be free to steal millions of dollars from their companies [1][2]? Be free to "renovate homes for Ghosn in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Paris and Amsterdam" on pensioners' dimes? Get a free pass from investigation by multiple countries [3] because they ran a PR campaign while they were pillaging?
Anyone informed defending Ghosn is essentially rejecting the rule of law, full stop. He's wanted for serious crimes in multiple countries with discordant agendas.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nissan-ghosn-allegations-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn#Initial_arrest
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-22/france-is...
And they were all quite happy to go along with it, for a long, long time. Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?
Hypotheticals, sure. I’m not familiar with his every crime. Just the big ones.
> Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?
It sounds like the answer to the above questions, for you, is yes. Fraud. Embezzlement. All okay, because the ultimate victims, the shareholders, either didn’t push back better or were further defrauded by a possibly corrupt, possibly incompetent Board. We can’t know either way because the guy up and offed to Beirut, where he sits a fugitive of multiple international arrest warrants.
So there we are. The people in charge of controlling him, the people whose job it is to supervise him, didn't.
Sure. I made an analogy to Enron elsewhere.
But their incompetence, potentially collusion, doesn’t excuse Ghosn. And the path to holding them responsible is through him. The flip side of this, also unexplored, is that people with skeletons in their closets don't tend to hide them alone. Who else is complicit? Who among them was blackmailed, and which decisions were unduly influenced by that?
It doesn't make you a monster if you just happen to admire a criminal. That's human nature; people have admired all sorts of criminals, especially stylish ones who get away with things. There's a whole film genre about them.
But, like, if we're going to discuss them on a message board, we should probably be clear about the fact that Danny Ocean and his gang deserve to be --- in fact, really kind of need to be --- in prison.
I mean, even if I wasn’t in his billionaire shoes I’d do the same - if facing a long imprisonment in a foreign country I’d take chance at escaping any day.
The Feds in USA have a 97% guilty rate, so this same logic could be used basically saying because defendants in federal USA trials have virtually no chance of getting off scott free they can escape and we shouldnt call that injustice.
"Japan
The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' conviction rate would be 99.8%."
And he has since had to settle a massive fraud charge from the US SEC and is the subject of an arrest warrant from France now too. Bit hard to just dismiss the whole thing as being due to racist authoritarian Japan.
2) What was he a victim of? There are allegations and counter allegations, why should he have the presumption of innocence but not these "Nissan executives"?
> In his shoes, I would feel morally justified in escaping.
I'm guessing most CEO types would feel moral in personally deciding the punishment for their crimes is unfair and therefore they are justified in committing more crimes to get away with their earlier crimes...
> If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?
An emotionally charged question because of the situation now, but there are many who get "unfair" sentences for drugs all over the world including people jailed in Russia for similar crimes, people executed in South East Asia and the Middle East for drugs, and people locked away in the US for years on non violent crimes based on legislation and prosecutions orchestrated by the likes of President Biden and Vice President Harris.
Not that you can't be against all of those things, but it's a pretty huge crutch that seems to be trying to equate Japan's justice system with Russia's, and harsh penalties for personal drug use with the often very lenient punishments for fraud and embezzlement. "If you aren't with Ghosn then you're with Putin" is a bridge too far.
> Edit. Everyone talking about hypothetical burglaries and $10 thefts from poor people: please explain what, exactly, Ghosn was accused of stealing, and from whom?
Some millions of dollars. From company shareholders.
One would hope we'd be able to prevent something like that, but it's a big country.
How can a parent take a kid out of the country without the consent of the other parent without it being categorized as kidnapping. Being that the kid is an American citizen can't the U.S. system get Japan to send this kid back(if the mother is only Japanese and not the kid). Didn't America extradite the Americans involved in Ghosen's escape? So they should have agreements this such legal matters to no?
P.s. I really didn't agree with American extraditing it's citizen in Goshen's case.
And I mean, you will have your cross to bear eventually. That's life.
She really needs professional assistance but won't seek it, and her family have been slow to move her towards doing so, as her Dad is a prominent religious official in their small town, and there's some shame in having an unwell daughter.
But, recently they've acknowledged that there is something that needs treatment and have been gradually approaching it, which gives my brother hope. He loves her, of course, but there's marriages worth fighting for, and marriages where you're being abused. Currently, his is the latter.
So... not super similar ;)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn#Career
It's confusing, I hear people say he "escaped" and I hear people say he should be prosecuted for escaping. Weird.
Basically Enron except he stole the money [1]. (Also, less of it.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn#Initial_arrest
Yup! (I mean, it went to subsidiaries for pay his family and his own entities. Or was laundered to pay for a party at Versailles. Fairly standard stuff.)
This is a false dichotomy, it is also quite possible that illicit activity by Ghosn provided convenient ammunition to people with incentive to have him removed.
People pushing the binary narrative focus on how the Japanese prosecution seems over the top for what is essentially a financial reporting law violation. However, the reporting issues are only two of the allegations.
The other two seem more serious, breach of trust in getting Nissan to cover collateral for FX losses, and misappropriation of funds in which $15 million was sent to a Nissan dealership, a portion of which was then transferred to a company controlled by Ghosn.
Adding to these the French arrest warrant on charges of money laundering and abuse of company assets, which seem to include misuse of company funds to allegedly pay for a lavish personal party at Versailles, one must wonder if online Ghosn supporters are organic or reputation management staff.
O: https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/j4ccy4/how_being...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/tcxseo/arrested_...
The video is now private (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYhWZ0IYFSg) but for some reasons I have a backup of the video. This link is a fair re-upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Fz9ThQvH4
Ghosn is very credible here, if unlike WSJ, you wish to consider the facts. "[I]t is quite possible" is not factual matter.
This story involves industrial policy and interests of at least two major powers: France and Japan. In that scale of matters, Ghosn is a little guy. Good for him for escaping what sounds like hell.
https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/ghosn-shares-damning-new-docum...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/business/michael-taylor-c...