Easy answer - washed a large amount of money for the oligarch after the acquisition (clean transfer from Russian acquirer to oligarch plus its advantageous tax treatment).
Easy answer - washed a large amount of money for the oligarch after the acquisition (clean transfer from Russian acquirer to oligarch plus its advantageous tax treatment).
This game involves separating credit from its underlying debt obligation, collecting the credit and then letting another limited liability corporate entity take the fall for not being able to meet the debt obligation. This is basically what Carl Icahn did with Hertz - He made Hertz take huge loans from banks, then Hertz awarded one of Carl's other companies a huge multi-million dollar contract using that loan money, then Hertz declared bankrupcy. Carl gets to keep the money he received from that big contract. Carl gets the credit, Hertz takes the fall. Carl took no risks and added no value.
When you also consider that those initial loans are printed out of thin air by banks, it becomes clear that our economy is founded on legitimized fraud.
We have a system which rewards fraudsters at the expense of honest people.
What is the difference between right and wrong when the law itself encourages wrongdoing? Nobody seems to knows what is the difference between right and wrong anymore. If the law said it was OK to kill people, we would all start killing each other the next day. That's how superficial our morals have become.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are...
Not the "honest graft", which I can kinda wrap my head around.
What worries more are the hidden economies. The traditional trifecta of drugs, arms, human trafficking. Which would probably now include industrial espionage, demographic data, computer security stuff. (Just occurs to me this may be the "Dark Web" category.) The kind of stuff mid-career Seymour Hersh covered.
I really thought Sibel Edmonds' whistle blowing was going to mainstream this topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibel_Edmonds
I guess I feel like there are so many hidden factors, of significant influence, that talking about visible finance, corruption, globalization, whatever feels wholly inadequate.
Back when I was working on election integrity I fully expected to be arrested, end up in jail and then prison. Maybe a dozen activists before me (nationwide) got pretty roughed up for telling the truth.
Most financial crimes are still just plain old “paper cons”. They lie on the paperwork.
At least in the US, regulatory agencies are so underfunded or had their mission altered such that “paper cons” happen constantly.
Panama Papers, many of Trumps tax dodge schemes (among others, calling him out because of viz, all those guys “do it”) etc
All very obvious, well known financial schemes.
Basically the origin of the word privilege comes from Latin “privy lege” ... “privileged by the law”.
Humanity is still ruled by ruthless tribalists looking to conquer the globe.
Ain’t nothing changed about it except the literal “who”, and sound forms and visual glyphs used to describe. We use a lot less Latin and romantic notions of higher powers in the sky, but still kowtow to hierarchy based upon scientific bullshit, convincing people “THESE annotations of the numbers are it, boy howdy! We def got IT right this generation! Sorry about rocket cars, but our finance scheme numbers keep going up so we did it!”
Still biologically motivated to the same ends.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. That's in the site guidelines also.
If the paperwork's lie were the only problem, then it could just be corrected to account for the theft, and all would be well.