I think GPs point is that there is little here to deter other academics who behave the same way. From my time in academia, there are plenty of professors I knew

I think GPs point is that there is little here to deter other academics who behave the same way. From my time in academia, there are plenty of professors I knew who behaved this way (not direct falsification, but rewarding the winners). This is a particularly egregious case of a high profile person. In most other cases, if misconduct is detected, the buck is passed on to the individual researcher/grad student. I personally know a fellow student who falsified data, published papers, and was caught. Only he, not the coauthors, got in trouble.