The long arm of Justice finally catches up with the guilty parties? Sounds like a movie script. A western? Or are these bad guys so incompetent that they don't even rise to "Hollywood Western" standards of evil?
Liked:
“In Hollywood, when somebody shows you a Picasso, it’s either worth a lot more than they say it is, or a whole lot less”.
I live in the USA. This describes my world right now. I was naturally going to use the T word, but I held my tongue.
And a role so bad even Reagan refused to play it? Priceless. Today there is no role so bad that someone will not take it.
like I say, the thing about this is that it was a big deal for Hollywood, but by the standards of 1980s Italian political-crime-nexus, all of these guys were junior varsity. It very much quietens the mind to remember that Silvio Berlusconi first came to power as the *anti* corruption candidate - he was only able to go into politics because an entire generation had been wiped out by the post-tangentopoli collapse.
«Silvio Berlusconi first came to power as the *anti* corruption candidate»
IIRC he came to power as the anti-tax pro-evasion candidate and that was always his main political line.
«he was only able to go into politics because an entire generation had been wiped out by the post-tangentopoli collapse.»
As to why he entered politics suddenly taking away time from running a number of businesses an italian insider once told me his "conspiracy theory" that Berlusconi was the administrator of the massive fortune of Craxy the head of the party of DeMichelis and when Craxy had to leave Italy to avoid prison Berlusconi had to enter politics to protect both himself and Craxy from further troubles.
Possibly relatedly IIRC I think I read (perhaps from the FT) several years ago that the shareholders of the companies managed by Berlusconi were Berlusconi himself with 6% and 94% belonged to 21 PO boxes in Switzerland.
«That principle is that a control fraud needs to be a theft carried out by honest means. The payments themselves made to the fraudster are made through legitimate commercial transactions; salaries, bonuses, dividends,»
I have written in the past that what I call "the blissex principle of control fraud" is that all non-trivial corporate frauds are insufficient depreciation in the usual sense, or something equivalent like insufficient depreciation of risk (under-estimating risk or under-provisioning against risk), that flatter book profits and enable "privatizing" the cash flow with engorged "salaries, bonuses, dividends". That is why auditors are so highly paid.
Then advantage of under-depreciation is also that when the control fraud bankrupts the corporation whether depreciation was proper or not can always be disputed, at least in criminal cases, and arguments about proper levels of depreciation are difficult to follow for judges and juries.
«mansion rentals, contracts for actresses who never act, and so on [...] If you start simply grabbing the money, then two things happen. Firstly, it becomes easier to spot you,»
These "mansion rentals, contracts for actresses" are trivial corporate frauds of the "simply grabbing the money" type. It is too easy to easy to spot them as self-dealing.
BTW I am pleased that no quantum communications crossover happened here and I am reading here a post from my parallel world instead of the much nicer real world; while despite trying to refresh several times the post over at "chrisdillow" keeps loading from the real world where politicians make bad decisions because they are innocently fooled by sampling bias, instead of this parallel world where french and italian politicians "sponsor" or are "sponsored by" gross shysters.
This is a really fun story, to read from a safe distance from events described. Always wondered about how/why Credit Lyonnais got into trouble in the 1990's
You would need a specialist in "tawdry." And who would want to see such a movie, unless it were turned into an outright comedy, a la "Dr. Strangelove," or Sellers in "Being There"? Or how about an AI movie with a virtual Sellers playing all the roles? What noob has some excess cash lying around to invest in it? Promise to pay them back in Bitcoin or something dubious like that, after all the expenses get deducted by the creative accounting department. I'm sure there's a yacht they had to rent for some scene or other, at an exotic location. And the catering...
Mark Twain could have had great fun with this material. Our Dan just did!
when I say "hasn't appeared in English before" I mean, obviously it has, it was in the newspapers and that. my version hasn't.
The long arm of Justice finally catches up with the guilty parties? Sounds like a movie script. A western? Or are these bad guys so incompetent that they don't even rise to "Hollywood Western" standards of evil?
Liked:
“In Hollywood, when somebody shows you a Picasso, it’s either worth a lot more than they say it is, or a whole lot less”.
I live in the USA. This describes my world right now. I was naturally going to use the T word, but I held my tongue.
And a role so bad even Reagan refused to play it? Priceless. Today there is no role so bad that someone will not take it.
Thank you very much.
like I say, the thing about this is that it was a big deal for Hollywood, but by the standards of 1980s Italian political-crime-nexus, all of these guys were junior varsity. It very much quietens the mind to remember that Silvio Berlusconi first came to power as the *anti* corruption candidate - he was only able to go into politics because an entire generation had been wiped out by the post-tangentopoli collapse.
And T claimed to be the guy to "drain the swamp." Not that any thinking person ever believed that.
Our ruling class is now full of players who weren't even JV; they refused to come to practice, then whined that they didn't make the team. So unfair!
If only they weren't given fire to play with as a consolation prize.
The people here actually voted in a twisted version of the Peter Sellers character in "Being There". Oh, what a genius he is!
Someday, this will make a movie, or even an epic story (or anti-epic).
What will happen if the Gods get angry with us?
«Silvio Berlusconi first came to power as the *anti* corruption candidate»
IIRC he came to power as the anti-tax pro-evasion candidate and that was always his main political line.
«he was only able to go into politics because an entire generation had been wiped out by the post-tangentopoli collapse.»
As to why he entered politics suddenly taking away time from running a number of businesses an italian insider once told me his "conspiracy theory" that Berlusconi was the administrator of the massive fortune of Craxy the head of the party of DeMichelis and when Craxy had to leave Italy to avoid prison Berlusconi had to enter politics to protect both himself and Craxy from further troubles.
Possibly relatedly IIRC I think I read (perhaps from the FT) several years ago that the shareholders of the companies managed by Berlusconi were Berlusconi himself with 6% and 94% belonged to 21 PO boxes in Switzerland.
«That principle is that a control fraud needs to be a theft carried out by honest means. The payments themselves made to the fraudster are made through legitimate commercial transactions; salaries, bonuses, dividends,»
I have written in the past that what I call "the blissex principle of control fraud" is that all non-trivial corporate frauds are insufficient depreciation in the usual sense, or something equivalent like insufficient depreciation of risk (under-estimating risk or under-provisioning against risk), that flatter book profits and enable "privatizing" the cash flow with engorged "salaries, bonuses, dividends". That is why auditors are so highly paid.
Then advantage of under-depreciation is also that when the control fraud bankrupts the corporation whether depreciation was proper or not can always be disputed, at least in criminal cases, and arguments about proper levels of depreciation are difficult to follow for judges and juries.
«mansion rentals, contracts for actresses who never act, and so on [...] If you start simply grabbing the money, then two things happen. Firstly, it becomes easier to spot you,»
These "mansion rentals, contracts for actresses" are trivial corporate frauds of the "simply grabbing the money" type. It is too easy to easy to spot them as self-dealing.
BTW I am pleased that no quantum communications crossover happened here and I am reading here a post from my parallel world instead of the much nicer real world; while despite trying to refresh several times the post over at "chrisdillow" keeps loading from the real world where politicians make bad decisions because they are innocently fooled by sampling bias, instead of this parallel world where french and italian politicians "sponsor" or are "sponsored by" gross shysters.
This is a really fun story, to read from a safe distance from events described. Always wondered about how/why Credit Lyonnais got into trouble in the 1990's
Larger than life! I don't think even Wes Anderson could do this story justice.
You would need a specialist in "tawdry." And who would want to see such a movie, unless it were turned into an outright comedy, a la "Dr. Strangelove," or Sellers in "Being There"? Or how about an AI movie with a virtual Sellers playing all the roles? What noob has some excess cash lying around to invest in it? Promise to pay them back in Bitcoin or something dubious like that, after all the expenses get deducted by the creative accounting department. I'm sure there's a yacht they had to rent for some scene or other, at an exotic location. And the catering...
Mark Twain could have had great fun with this material. Our Dan just did!