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Good for Germany, but it is all too rare to see bad corporate behaviour punished like this. Steal £10k from a company, and you will probably go to prison for a
by hermitcrab 1y ago
Good for Germany, but it is all too rare to see bad corporate behaviour punished like this. Steal £10k from a company, and you will probably go to prison for a long time. Start a company and steal billions from your customers and/or the tax payer, and you will probably get away with it. I believe Iceland was the only country to jail bankers after the 2008 banking disaster. We are still waiting for the British government to bring any individuals to account for wide scale corruption and profiteering during COVID.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoBecause with large companies, blame and accountability gets spread thin over a wide area till it evaporates, so everyone gets away with it.
- fanwood 1y agoNot really, it's just that rich people are mostly above the law most of the time
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoRich people are above the law precisely because they use corporations and corporate laws as shields to deflect personal liability of their actions as a actions of "the company" which is a faceless entity. "You see, I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money, but that's actually on you because you didn't read the fine print I put in the contract you signed. And don't worry, justice was served, the company got punished and is now insolvent. Now watch this drive *swings golf club*"
- wat10000 1y agoIt’s worse than that. Rich-people crimes are often codified as much less severe than regular-people crimes, or are just outright legal. This is a great example. Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal. Stab a person in the lungs, go to jail. Kill people by putting toxins into their lungs, well, just stay under this limit. Walk out the door with a $10 item you didn’t pay for, crime. Fail to pay your worker $1,000 that they earned, that’s a civil matter. Worst case you’ll have to pay a penalty.
- lkbm 1y ago> Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal. Polluting is not a "rich person" crime. It's very much something normal/poor people do a lot, too. It's common for individuals to burn leaves. It's less common, but also an active problem, for them to burn piles of trash (including plastic, tires, etc.) As an individual, I'm allowed to do a certain amount of pollution (some because it's legal, some because it's unenforced), and will get fined if I do too much, same as the corporation.
- wat10000 1y agoAs an individual, at least you can make the argument that your activities result in far less than one death. What’s the appropriate punishment for one micromort? I don’t know the answer to that but it’s probably not too much. Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
- lb1lf 1y ago“Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.” Edward, Lord Thurlow c.1850
- lurk2 1y ago> I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money This isn’t how it works.
- const_cast 1y agoThis is exactly how it works. Liability spread out over even just 10 people is so much less risky than one person. A corporation can do pretty much anything. Steal, lie, poison communities, give people HIV. Anything.
- lurk2 1y ago> This is exactly how it works. No, it isn’t. Limited liability does not shield executives from criminal prosecution. If an LLC defrauds another party, the perpetrators are both criminally and civilly liable; this is true in every common law country you can think of. Limited liability corporations enjoy a limitation of civil liability (i.e. the shareholders cannot be held liable for more than the company is worth). This limitation is not exhaustive in the case of fraud or criminal negligence. In practice it is of course possible that people “get away with” both, but that is a failing of law enforcement, not limited liability itself.
- anovikov 1y agoWhen it comes to criminal offences, they are pretty much within the law, well except they can afford better lawyers so usually get away with minimum legally possible punishment. Companies and the concept of limited liability exists to make innovation possible. No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. And, because majority of money businessmen make is the stock worth, company being insolvent and thus it's stock losing all value is in itself a punishment heavy enough for the founders.
- nemonemo 1y agoWe need to balance the benefit and the downside of the limited liability in corporations. If innovation no longer becomes beneficial for the society and only beneficial for a small number of people, perhaps the society may need to reconsider the concept.
- lucianbr 1y ago> No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. What does that have to do with anything? We're not discussing a case of VW making bad business decisions and losing money. If you start a company and break the law and harm people, you should have your house confiscated and/or go to prison. If you can't take this responsibility, just don't start the startup, that's perfect. You are creating confusion about the subject being discussed in order to defend criminals.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYes that was a bad example. The "limited liability" concept applies to financial losses, not crimes.
- thatguy0900 1y agoWhy would you go to jail unless you're doing something illegal? Are you honestly saying startups should be legally exempt from pollution laws and allowed to cheat brazenly on commissions tests by public agencies? It's fair for rich people to just lose some income(and still be rich) for crimes while poor people have to go to jail is honestly a unhinged take
- constantcrying 1y agoIn this case both the company and the responsible managers were held liable. Of course a lot of blame shifting was attempted, but clearly it did not result in no one being held responsible.
- aeyes 1y agoUltimately the CEO is responsible. To me it doesn't even matter if the CEO knows about it or not, if not the company has poor governance which is the CEOs full responsibility. Wirecard CEO has been arrested since 2020, will probably sit for another 10 years.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoI believe "knew or should have known" is the legal statement. Ignorance (either deliberate or accidental) doesn't get you off the hook.
- nthingtohide 1y agoRhodesia solution is magnificient in this case. Sending A Letter To The PM | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6lpKkcFQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6lpKkcFQY
- brookst 1y agoBut negligence is fundamentally different from mens rea. Fine to punish both but I am not a fan of justice intentionally ignoring context.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> But negligence is fundamentally different from mens rea It differs in that mens rea is the legal concept of a culpable state of mind, and negligence is one example. More fully, a crime is generally defined by a prohibited act (actua reus) and a wrongful state of mind (mens rea), though there are strict liability crimes with no mens rea required. For, say, murder (in common law, specific statutory schemes may diverge from this somewhat), the actus reus is homicide, and the mens rea is “malice aforethought”. While “malice aforethought” is sui generis and seen only in murder, the common kinds of mens rea used in defining crimes, in descending order of the severity with which they are usually treated, are intent, recklessness, and negligence. (The same mental states are relevant in tort liability, though strict liability in tort is more common, and the civil and criminal definitions of negligence, particularly, are somewhat different.)
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoSomeone floated on here that the punishment should be partial government ownership stakes instead of weak fines. It doesn't syphon off funds and risk damaging important national companies that are 'too big to punish'. Instead it dilutes shareholder value and DIRECTLY impacts the company owners. It also gives the government an inside place in the company which no company wants to deal with. If a company doesn't change ultimately the owners lose ownership.
- lucianbr 1y agoProof that solutions exist, if we want them. Whatever the cause of the apparent impunity of large corporations and rich people, it is not a lack of workable solutions. See also fines proportional to income, which now exist in multiple countries.
- 7952 1y agoI wonder if you could require the company to licence all its IP for free within the country. So that the brand and designs could still exist.
- DocTomoe 1y agoVW already is owned by the German state of NRW (20% of the voting rights, 11.8% of the equity)
- junga 1y agoNot exactly. Volkswagen headquarters are located in Wolfsburg which belongs to the German state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). NRW, or officially abbreviated NW, is the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen). Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.
- rurban 1y agoVW is owned by the Porsche family. Audi also shortly owned it. Audi creates the engines for VW, because VW by itself can create nothing much by itself.
- potato3732842 1y agoNot just companies, nonprofits, religions, governments
- constantcrying 1y ago>Start a company and steal billions from your customers and/or the tax payer, and you will probably get away with it. In this case not only were the managers personally held liable, the company itself also had to pay vast amounts of compensation to customers. Not only in Germany or the EU, but also to US customers.
- hulitu 1y ago> not only were the managers personally held liable Yes but not all of them. The top one is still evading justice.
- DocTomoe 1y agoGood luck proving where the decision was made. Volkswagen's CEO is unlikely to have been asked whether to be 'creative' about testing setups.
- Aeolun 1y agoHe’s not evading justice if he was never involved. That’s the whole point of having a 4 year trial, so you can figure out who was actually guilty.
- arthurcolle 1y agoThey jailed 1 banker lol
- MrDresden 1y ago> They jailed 1 banker lol You've been incorrectly informed. As reported back in 2018[0], 36 individuals had already received a cumulative jail sentence of 96 years, with still more cases ongoing when this report was written. [0]: https://www.visir.is/g/20181632401d/36-manns-i-samtals-96-ara-fangelsi-i-hrunmalunum https://www.visir.is/g/20181632401d/36-manns-i-samtals-96-ar...
- arthurcolle 1y agoThanks for the correction. I incorrectly recalled from that documentary "Inside Job"
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- izacus 1y agoThe question is, whether VW as a German company is now going to end up being beaten by US competitors which could do even more nasty stuff unpunished.
- LunaSea 1y agoGermany is free to prove that these companies are cheating as well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thatguy0900 1y agoWe should let our executives commit crimes lest they be outcompeted by other executives committing worse crimes is a terrible argument. It's more a argument for not letting the other company compete as easily in your country
- dguest 1y agoNot to mention that it assumes assumes lying, cheating, and corruption is just the price you pay for quality products. Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
- izacus 1y agoIf our companies get destroyed, people fired and US/Chinese crooks win while EU spirals into recession, moral high ground is going to be a poor comfort.
- bratwurst3000 1y agoif vw for example would „get destroyed“ it would be more that some other company woulf take over control and do the job hopefully right. The company is the whole thing. production, workes, industrial plant etc… that wont go away if you take away upper management and stock owners.
- kunzhi 1y agoWell, as everyone knows, accountability really stifles innovation. All my libertarian friends tell me that it’d be better to privatize it rather than trying to legislate morality.
- bombcar 1y agoLuigi as privatized accountability?
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoIf powerful people were afraid they would be a lot less unhinged.
- weard_beard 1y agoIt’s true. The only check on most corporate fraud is an engineer with an Annecdote of real consequences.
- philwelch 1y agoThis isn’t how human psychology works at all.
- mg794613 1y agoThis isn’t how _normal_ human psychology works at all. We're talking about sociopaths, not people like you and me. How much of a percentage that is on that level, we can guess.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoWanna share with us what makes you qualified to make such definitive statements on human psychology?
- philwelch 1y agoYou don’t have to be an expert to know that fear and panic don’t make people hinged, they make them even more unhinged. In particular, terroristic violence almost always incites spiteful reaction against the perpetrators and anyone associated with them.
- SoftTalker 1y agoSBF is in prison, so it happens sometimes.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoUsually it happens only if you steal from investors. Stealing from consumers is fine.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoStealing from employees is just normal business in the US. $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered for US workers between 2021 and 2023. Imagine how much wasn't recovered. It is often the least able to take action/most in need of every dollar of their income that are stolen from. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats those with the least power versus those with power. https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/
- nickff 1y ago[flagged]
- Teever 1y agoThat isn't theft. If an employee completes all the work assigned to them and passes performance reviews then what you're describing is a suboptimal use of the employees on the part of the employer.
- SoftTalker 1y agoReal theft by employees is also extremely common. Especially in retail and food service.
- triceratops 1y agoAnd is treated as a criminal matter. But the manager telling employees to clock out before their shift ends is a civil matter.
- ferguess_k 1y ago窃(Steal)钩(hook)者(people)诛(gets a death sentence) 窃(Steal)国(country)者(people)侯(gets to be the king)
- OJFord 1y agoIs this missing a sentence like 'there is a saying in mandarin:'?
- docsaintly 1y agoI think they meant: 窃钩者诛，窃国者侯 qiègōuzhě zhū, qièguózhě hóu He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord. Yes, it is a Chinese idiom.
- anthk 1y agoThe same in Spanish. Steal a hen, get a harsh sentence. Steal millions, you are now a respectable 'businessman'.
- atrocious 1y agoThe law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose.
- Gibbon1 1y agoKill a man you're a murderer. Kill millions and you're a statesman.
- moomin 1y agoPretty sure that’s known as The Blair Doctrine.
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
- MPSFounder 1y agoAt least something came out of it. In 08, all the executives that tanked our economy retired and are enjoying manors in the Hampton and socialize in country clubs on Long Island. Cheney, an oil executive, started a war based on lies when he landed in the highest office of the land, and now owns hundreds of acres in Wyoming based on oil profits Halliburton extracted (and paid him as a consultant for 5years after his VP position, whatever that means). I wish we did a better job in the US sending our criminals to prison, but I guess a neoliberal capitalist society will always favor a) high fines over justice for white collar crimes, b) as little attention as possible, given a supposedly free media can make a raucous encore and draw more attention. It is a facet of the trade.
- tsoukase 1y agoAuto industry is the material God of Germany. Similar to SW companies in the US. These people have immunity solely because they support the system. Do you think the US would extradit top level FAANG people if they indirectly harmed some foreign country? No way!
- alanl 1y agoIreland jailed a 3 or 4 bankers after the crash. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drumm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drumm It took 10 yrs to convict them mind you, and as I understand it they’re all out now.
- hermitcrab 1y agoI stand corrected. Thanks.
- GuB-42 1y agoAnd I think there is a good reason for that. When a company steals billions from customers, the entire company is responsible, and the entire company profits from the crime. So why single out a few executives? Everyone shall be punished: the CEO of course, but also every employee, every shareholder. You have a single VW stock, you are responsible too. So, how do you punish everyone fairly? By fining the company for a large amount of money. Shareholders lose their value, employees don't get their raise, and execs won't get their bonus, there is a good chance they get fired too. Companies are for profit, it is even more true for public companies, for which profit is their duty to their shareholders. So hit where it hurts, that is profits. As for jailing CEOs, what will it bring? Don't forget that a CEO is just an employee, hired by the directors to maximize profits for the shareholders. If the entire company is corrupt, everyone will be more than happy to hire scapegoat CEOs if it can serve their interests. Jailing them will solve nothing, it may even be counter productive as those who are most likely to get that job are people who are ready to risk prison to win big, a crime lord profile. There are still reasons to jail the CEO, but only if he personally deceived the rest of the company and shareholders, but that is effectively the same as stealing from the company.
- Neywiny 1y agoMy issue with your comment is that you're taking the humanity out of it. A person or group of people decided to commit crimes. Go to jail. If a group of people hired a scapegoat, that group still would've conspired to commit crimes. That's a punishable offense. Punish them. You can punish a board of directors. You can persecute a C-suite. They're all humans. That's the way justice is. Nobody is above the law.
- itsanaccount 1y agoCorporate death penalty. I want to see these groups of "shareholder value" get destroyed. Equal to a damage of a normal death penalty to an individual. Spread the organization to the winds. If that means a "company" becomes smaller, with more isolated crews run by their own leadership, good.
- 1y ago
- mcv 1y agoMost blatant case was when the HSBC bank was found guilty of laundering billions for Mexican drug cartels. Any person found guilty of that, would have gone to prison for years, but nobody at HSBC went to prison, and the bank was fined mere millions for the crime of laundering billions. I'm sure that taught them a lesson. So I'm glad finally seeing some repercussions for corporate crime.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago> the 2008 banking disaster We would do well to overhaul the banking system by categorically eliminating usury and much speculative nonsense. It is incredible the amount of rationalization that goes into propping up these morally indefensible practices. Criminalizing them will go a long way to eliminate many legitimized patterns of economic exploitation.
- EasyMark 1y agoSame in USA, tons of corps misappropriated funds that were meant to help keep employees hired. Almost no prosecutionsat all and the records the government kept were abysmal
- WalterBright 1y agoSam Bankster-Fraud is currently sitting in jail, and Madoff died in jail. Elizabeth Holmes is sitting in jail, too.
- candiddevmike 1y agoThey stole from rich and powerful people. Rick Scott was the CEO of a company that committed the largest Medicare fraud to date and never saw prison time.
- mrguyorama 1y agoNot only did he not see prison time, but republicans in Florida elected him to serve on the Senate. Seems like a pattern honestly.
- seventytwo 1y agoSeems everyone in here recognizes the problem. I wonder how many actually choose to empower regulators when it comes time to vote each year…
- andrewkyren066 1y ago[dead]