Execs Avoiding Jail

Comments express frustration that corporate executives behind major frauds and scams face no personal jail time, only company fines, referencing cases like Wells Fargo, the 2008 financial crisis, and Enron.

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Keywords

MS US SBF SEC OK theatlantic.com me.He wikipedia.org COO DOJ jail fraud prison crimes sec wells financial fines execs commit

Sample Comments

gtirloni Sep 4, 2017 View on HN

It's a situation similar to bankers and the financial crisis. That is, extremely difficult to jail someone for it.This article explains it better: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/why-are...

Gigachad Jul 15, 2022 View on HN

Why are the people behind these companies not in jail?

than3 May 13, 2023 View on HN

The people involved should go to prison. This is no less of an offense than corruption by judges, or other public official. It may be one step removed, but if you don't make an example out of companies and the people involved, this will keep happening as a tacit agreement that its ok, and it isn't.

ericjmorey Sep 5, 2024 View on HN

This seems no worse than what Deutsche Ban and Wells Fargo have been caught doing. I think maybe his mistake was not doing this through corporate obfuscation at a large enough scale. Although Bankman-Fried and Madoff got punished with prison time, they threatened the wealthy with their fraud so steering clear of that has to be taken into account.

smt88 Sep 4, 2019 View on HN

The rest of us go to jail for breaking the law. Why shouldn't execs?

misiti3780 Feb 21, 2019 View on HN

It's not cliché, it's NOT ok that these corporations can commit huge crimes and no one goes to jail. I would say the fact that you seem OK with it is not OK.Literally no one went to jail for the crimes of 2007-2008. No one went to jail for laundering money for the cartels, no one went to jail for Libor scandal, and no one went to jail here. Yet if you walk into McDonalds and rob it of the amount in the cash register, you could go to jail for many years

cmdrfred Oct 14, 2016 View on HN

The laws on fraud seem drasticly more punitive when you aren't the CEO of Wells Fargo or Mylan.

djsumdog Apr 28, 2018 View on HN

Yea .. seems kinda shady. Still, we see shady practices for people in large companies all the time. They've got an entire team of board members and crew to share in the process, so the result is almost always monetary compensation, fines, etc.Maybe we should see more CEOs in jail in a similar manner, when their decisions to commit fraud intentionally causes the loss of savings and homes for so many average working class people?In any case, we're seeing his small shop and his atte

AgentK20 May 14, 2023 View on HN

Why are the people who ran these companies not in jail?

gameswithgo Jan 14, 2021 View on HN

management could be jailed for fraud.it is the usual thing where the powerful we say “best we could do” but for the weak we find a way to get them in jail if we don’t like them