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Comment by staplers | Hacker News Reader

Only citizens get prison, citizens acting behind a corporation get fines.

Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried, just to name some infamous cases

Tiny tip of the iceberg. And all of those only got to prison for crimes against their investors, not for crimes done on behalf of their investors. Your examples actually support grandparent's point.

>Tiny tip of the iceberg. And all of those only got to prison for crimes against their investors, not for crimes done on behalf of their investors

False. SBF was specifically convicted of committing wire fraud on FTX customers, not just investors/lenders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bankman-Fried

  not just investors/lenders

Still waiting on the non-billionaire investors example.

I'm not sure those are instances of executives being held to account for harm to the public as much as they're instances of people being punished for stealing money from the wealthy.

Weren't some of madoff's victims pension funds? I'd call that harm to public.

I think they all harmed the public.

My point is that it seems that the only circumstances that lead to corporate decision makers being held to account for wrongdoing is if someone can link their wrongdoing to a financial fraud.

>much as they're instances of people being punished for stealing money from the wealthy.

Don't most instances of corporate malfeasance result in "stealing money from the wealthy"? If you do a bad, try to cover it up, and then try to raise money from investors, that's basically stealing money from them.

Plenty of corporate malfeasance ends after the "do a bad" or the "cover it up" steps.

Yeah but their victims were other wealthy people.

Who went to jail for the BP oil spill? The wells Fargo auto signing? Will anyone go to jail for the price fixing for rentals?

If I remember correctly, both Bernie Madoff and SBF had a vast number of victims of all economic classes. I think this is more related to the ability to build a criminal case.

Although I agree that the driving factor is the ease of building a case, you entirely missed the argument being made by the prior comment.

The Wells Fargo scandal is a good illustration of the problem with this kind of thing. The people who actually opened the fake accounts were low level sales staff and their direct managers, who public opinion saw as victims of unrealistic expectations. So prosecuting any of the actual perpetrators wasn't politically feasible. The only other person they could find to prosecute was an executive who didn't support the fake accounts, and routinely had her team fire people who opened them, but knew about them and didn't disclose them when she should have. Which is a crime, don't get me wrong, but it's not a very serious one.

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