If you're not willing to do that ... well, see you in court. Over and over, because every individual you hurt should have a chance to come at you with a liability claim.
Pursuing their assets introduces vast complexities of international law.
"In a brief filed on behalf of the relatives of Mortimer Sackler, most of whom are based overseas, lawyers warned of “significant litigation costs and risks” in seeking to enforce any foreign court judgments against the family if the settlement were thrown out."
I understand your point, but basically they are saying: "We hid all our assets to evade the law. Give us immunity from criminal money laundering evasion and we will only pay part of what we likely would have owed."
Can you imagine a member of Congress or the President saying this? Forgoing immunity is a scorched earth tactic, but it is also one that will dissuade future abusers. We have those overseas money reporting laws that make it difficult for Americans to get bank accounts overseas. Let's use them!
> Can you imagine a member of Congress or the President saying this?
Yes.
> We have those overseas money reporting laws that make it difficult for Americans to get bank accounts overseas. Let's use them!
This is conflating two things.
It is not criminal to move money offshore, and nothing suggested any money laundering occurred, because it is not necessary to launder money to move it offshore. And it is also not money laundering to obfuscate money's origin or destination. Money laundering requires a criminal origin and then obfuscation.
Despite how much the US has convinced its entire culture to stigmatize the concept of moving money, the US is operating in its own bubble of hubris to suggest money has to stay within its ecosystem. It doesn't make any sense at all when you say it out loud does it?
To your second point, the US has reporting laws on money held offshore legally, for US citizens. For banks, this is merely an additional compliance burden that disincentivizes them from dealing with small accounts because its not worth it. But at Sackler money, it is worth it. It is not hard to find someone to bank you as an American. And at Sackler levels of money you don't have to remain a US citizen, hence absolving the reporting requirements if they went that direction.
Or when you have a second citizenship, you can just not tell the US about it, and you can just not tell the foreign bank about your US citizenship. Prosecute that on its own, if you find out.
and finally, there are gaps in this reporting framework. FATCA treaty was a broad expansion of a country's power, to the limit of our global society in the continuum of history. And its not completely as omnipresent as the American psyche imagined. Just like the global sanctions attempt on Russia showed, its a nice try but now everyone can see how much is hubris in plain sight.
Renouncing your citizenship because you owe the US government money is generally not seen as a valid reason by the US government to renounce your citizenship.
Holding foreign assets that you did not report on an FBAR is a crime. Lying about it to the bank that asks if you are a US citizen wod be obfuscation to support a crime. I'm not sure why you are trying to argue that nothing criminal is being done in these scenarios.
- the foremost among the perpetrators are dead
- the rest of the family is culpable, but less so
- the settlement money will now be entirely repurposed for legal defense
- meanwhile the victims get nothing
Does justice demand punishment or compensation?
Which outcome provides the greatest disincentive against anyone else even contemplating doing something like this ever again?
definitely. The 2012 STOCK Act is routinely violated by members of congress who insider trade on information from congressional committees before laws are enacted. that money the openly argued about the legitimacy of in congress and Pelosi, for one, and Tommy Tuberville, for another argued that it should be allowed. Pelosi later changed her stance, but continues insider trading. you can find datasets for all this at (no relation...just interesting data) https://quiverquant.com
Throwing up our hands and declaring it an unsolvable issue just encourages others to misbehave and then escape the same way.
Roughly three orders of magnitude too small.
I'll edit the number above to ~100,000 as an estimate of the number of victims, since it looks like I misremembered 645,000 as the number of Purdue-related deaths. Still, that's assuming only 1.6% of those 6.2 million people taking OxyContin in 2002 developed an addiction, which seems low.