Is anyone else thinking?
Good.
This is realistically the *only* kind of disincentive they care about.
Insider trading does not pay, a judge in an American civil court declared, putting a record fine on Raj Rajaratnam, the businessman who was found guilty of insider trades using a network of tech insiders – including executives at IBM and Intel. The $92.8m fine handed down by Judge Jed Rakoff is in addition to an 11-year jail …
So when you get caught for shoplifting in the US they get to charge you with 3 times the value of the stolen merchandise, I guess this corporation favoring policy is based on the assumption that you have stolen more things that they don't know about.
Why is this same principal not applied to white collar crimes as well? (rhetorical question, I know the answer is because rich run the country).
If we really want to keep our investments and securities safe and fair for the common man, we should up the penalties on these arseholes so that they are definitely loosing more money (maybe double) than they stole. This would maybe have some affect on dissuading them from committing the crime in the first place. As it stands now, the worse you face is a short stint in Club Fed (prison with cable Tele and little to no ass-raping) and you get to keep some of the stolen loot ... all of it if you don't get caught
$92.8 fine and a total cost of $156.6 might be a lot to us (OK it's fantastically huge for us), but to him it's 9.3 and 15.6 % of his total wealth respectively. (And that's if he only has $1B exactly and not more)
Another way of looking at it is they've left him at least $844 million to survive on. Somehow I think he'll manage.
The only real penalty here is the 11 years (reduced for overcrowding) in the Florida country club
Personally I think the fine should have been a percentage of his wealth, and a large percentage at that