As much as this is (alas) true; and things can get a trifle out of hand if you stray from such guidance; one must be very careful to keep a close eye on ‘actually committed crimes’ and ‘provable in a court of law’ when dealing with the class of criminal smart enough to realize that there is better return and lower risk in making the law than in breaking it.
The more impulsive among them do tend to succumb to the temptation of treating effective impunity as a good reason to not even keep up with the paperwork required to keep things technically licit; and those can be nice, clean, catches if the wind shifts; but as the current crop of “Yes, you have difficulty believing that our Irish subsidiary actually owns all our patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other licensable stuff despite consisting exclusively of lawyers and accountants? Well, it turns out that we merely have to do it, not make it remotely plausible, in order to enjoy our current tax status; so isn’t that just so sad?” financial planners have enthusiastically demonstrated, so very much is technically legal when you have the appropriate leverage.
If you want to play lawful-good against those guys… I can’t lie to you about your chances; but you have my sympathies.
(Edit: aside from the chance to drag in the Alien quote; the blatantly obvious point I foolishly forgot is that, in currently notable news, the fact that we have any access to the contents of these ‘Panama Papers’ is all kinds of wicked and illegal; the product of some mixture of external electronic intrusion and inside job; massive breach of attorney-client privilege, probably involves investigative techniques and a chain of custody that even a DEA agent would feel the need to parallel-construct until hidden from view. Executions would certainly up the stakes substantially; but this whole affair is only coming to light because somebody decided that waiting for it to come out all nice and legal in discovery just wasn’t good enough.Not only would you lose; nobody would every have been under any obligation to admit that a conflict exists had this been kept strictly legal.)
Any chance that the party deputy and new ‘PM’ is a lawyer, for an added layer of opacity in any future communication between the beneficial owner and nominee director? That would seem like a nice touch.
I don’t disagree, but I think to a large extent former elected officials don’t get prosecuted for crimes because of a tacit agreement that it’s not done rather than because the evidence isn’t there.
If I remember the smarm correctly; exposing elected officials to consequences would ‘politicize justice’, not to mention being ‘divisive’.
At least in the ‘truth and reconciliation’ situations; there’s usually the (ugly but pragmatic) excuse that the sheer volume of guilt and the weakness of local institutions is such that ‘justice’ is simply logistically impossible, so you either get impunity with a few facts for the historical record; or you get impunity.
The PM just resigned after the exposure of financial misbehaviour that probably includes chargeable criminality. Also, the imprisoned bankers were released with a timing that strongly suggests a criminal interference in the normal functioning of the justice system.
So that gets us the PM and the Attorney General for starters. Given the circumstances, I think a thorough investigation of the finances and hidden conflicts of interest of the entire parliament is called for. Think we might find a few more infractions around the place?
