And if you are also familiar with RICO and think prosecution difficulty will save anyone from same...
EDIT:
Just so I am properly understanding your position, are you advocating for engaging in activities which would qualify as RICO crimes due to "how notoriously difficult they are to prosecute"?
Advocating? What? No, I'm not "advocating" for crime. I'm just pointing out that there are ways for crime to happen, to even be encouraged, without really risking the investors. Your "no such thing" comment, while maybe true in a nonexistant legally ideal reality, does not reflect how things play out in real life.
RICO is hard to prosecute on a good day. If an organization is usually law-abiding and occasionally structures things such that some lower manager has a near-impossible goal to hit that is made easier with crime, then one gets crime occasionally.
And that's also not counting all the crimes like environmental dumping, which consistently yield zero prosecution and slap the company with a fine that's 4% of what the company saved by dumping their waste in a river.
> Advocating? What? No, I'm not "advocating" for crime.
I didn't think so, but had to ask in order to ensure we have a common baseline.
> I'm just pointing out that there are ways for crime to happen, to even be encouraged, without really risking the investors. Your "no such thing" comment, while maybe true in a nonexistant legally ideal reality, does not reflect how things play out in real life.
I agree, there is always a way for criminal acts to be perpetrated, sometimes for years on end. My disagreement is with the encouragement portion having no risk to investors. As mentioned previously, criminal activities pierce the corporate veil[0], which can and do ensnare investors as well.
The complete quote to which I made my "[t]here is no such thing" comment is (with my initial quotation being the post-hyphenation fragment):
They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided
it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and
staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal
things and potentially end up in jail, if it makes the odds
of that company being a 100x exit - so long as the
investors and their staff are all insulated from the
illegal behavior and jail time risks.
Call me naive, but I do not consider my interpretation as being "a nonexistant legally ideal reality" that "does not reflect how things play out in real life."
Prosecutors are not stupid, nor are they robots incapable of reasoning and deduction. Quite to the contrary, they share many of the problem solving skills software engineers possess. And given a "big enough" problem, they will solve it via investigation and prosecutions.
As to what is chosen to prosecute and when, well, that is an entirely different discussion of which I am wholly unqualified to have.
EDIT:
Just so I am properly understanding your position, are you advocating for engaging in activities which would qualify as RICO crimes due to "how notoriously difficult they are to prosecute"?