It seems to me like Germany is running a great scam here.
- Take bribe from super rich dude.
- Accuse super rich dude of bribery.
- Accept settlement from super rich dude to get out of bribery charges.
Repeat as necessary.
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LOL. Billionaires serving jail time. Oh man, that’s good. You should flesh that out into a full blown fantasy world with like Trolls fo Accountants.
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There is this guy.
Kind of a shame, he did build a really nice cricket ground in Antigua that’s going to waste now.
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Putting it another way, if extra cheese costs $1.50 at your pizzeria of choice, then for the equation to hold for me, my net worth would have to be about forty-six bucks.
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Of course! Murder trials only cost $50 million.
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It definitely sounds fishy to me, but let me play devil’s advocate (ha!) for a second:
How is this different from a regular plea agreement?
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In a regular plea agreement, you get a conviction on your criminal record, even if no time is served.
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You know, I thought this was going to involve that other billionaire bribing that attorney general with cash, vacations, and fundariser space at Mar-a-Lago.
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The world has a billionaires problem. It has billionaires.
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Can’t they charge him with bribery for this? Because that would be awesome.
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Yup, Marginal value and marginal cost would show that losing 1/31st of his wealth would basically have no impact on what he can do with his wealth. It’s important to keep in mind that if you lose 1/31st of your wealth and you can barely make ends meet, you’re going to be a lot worse off than someone who can still buy a fleet of ferraris after losing half of their wealth.
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A Brit with a Nazi fetish, though.
No, Max Mosley was the Nazi sex dungeon F1 guy.
Wait…he doesn’t like people mentioning that, does he?
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Whoops, my bad. You’re right; I was thinkng of Mosley.
OTOH, Googling “Ecclestone + nazi” returns a lot of results, not all of which are about Mosley.
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It’s cases like these where the (often sympathetic in other contexts) “restorative justice” types tend to look particularly ineffectual.
It is true that, for many human interactions, the victim is probably better off; the perp probably better off, and society in general better served by restitution, an attempt to make the perpetrator understand the nature of their wrong to discourage repeating it, etc.
Once you get to the scale of ‘market rationality’, however, failure to be brutally punitive, ideally directly against the people making the decisions, not just their corporations, will hollow out your ‘laws’ into ‘just costs of doing business’ in short order.
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There’s a (rather dull) documentary that peripherally mentions him, his scam and some of the damage he actually did to the sport:
Death of a Gentleman
At 100 million I’m not even that upset. Usually I’m pissed that law & justice can be bought so cheaply - Trump got Pam Bondi off his case for a measly 25K.
I’m not sufficiently up on F1 to understand the stakes of the original bribe. At first glance, the reason he was bribing in the first place seems not super important?
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I watched that recently, having heard good things about it, and generally liking Jarrod Kimber. I was a bit disappointed. Fire in Babylon is a much better cricket film.
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Ssh! It wasn’t a Nazi sex dungeon. Justice Eady said so.* It was a perfectly normal S&M scenario set in a prison camp with German-speaking guards wearing military uniform and conducting medical examinations of the inmates.
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/24_07_08mosleyvnewsgroup.pdf, pp.11-16 (paras 44-65).
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LIkewise, French does not have an equivalent for “gullible”.
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