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Neither should billionaires

The death penalty is still deeply immoral though.

The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.

It appears to be a method the courts are employing to encourage her to surrender overseas assets.

In this particular situation, that $27bn is over 5% of Vietnam's GDP. This is a very significant hit to the nation's financial stability and one that will likely result in substantial number of excess deaths entirely due to increased poverty. I can see the threat of execution as a method to compel repayment as necessary.

In a better world, foreign banks complicit in Truong's 11 year long theft would cooperate to return the stolen money, thereby making this threat unnecessary. But so long as foreign financial institutions can hold a nation's wealth hostage, all the Vietnamese state leadership can manage is to respond in kind.

I agree. Truong My Lan could just as well, lose her assets and spend her days repaying her debts to society. You know, on a normal person's wage, trying to make up for billions upon billions. Should be enough time.

as someone opposed to prison-culture, I would suggest instead forcing them to contribute to society meaningfully through acts of service while losing privileges such as running businesses, sitting on boards, and reducing their ill-gotten gains to something akin to the average income and redistributing their stolen wealth to benefit communities.

Them sitting in a cube doesn't help society, but if they were forced to solve homelessness or else face The Cube, that would be better.

I agree, but only if they can't bribe their way out. A billion can hire a lot of people.

The only time they would get punished at all in the US is if they fucked over other billionaires. Even then, only maybe.

"I sentence to you ten years, with 9 years 360 days credit for time served, and a $25 fine. Your incarceration shall consist of checking in once weekly via Zoom."

Redistribute their wealth, then set their parole parameters: hold an average job in food service or retail; live in an average apartment off those wages; keep that up for a set number of years, without external assistance from any third parties.

Let them experience how the rest of us live.

In this particular case, she's hidden money overseas and the death penalty is being used to compel her to recover and return it.

Fucked up is the amount of suffering inflicted on others is required to amass billions of dollars. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, though.

Some are more guilty than others, and she's definitely near the top of the list.

Still, curious to see what a Socialist country like Vietnam does when its prosecutors catch a person like Truong My Lan red handed. Its such a far cry from what American prosecutors did with offending bank managers after the 2008 Financial Collapse or the UK prosecutors who investigated the Wirecard scandal or the SEC/FCC responded to countless instances in which Elon Musk got caught manipulating stock prices.

Goes to show you what happens when your country has a tyrannical government and its billionaires don't enjoy any freedoms.

It's just semantics at the end of the day, so not too important, but I'll play along because I happen to be someone who will call the U.S capitalist, but doesn't understand why people call China communist.

First, I'll start off with some definitions. If you disagree on one, provide your own and we can use those for the sake of discussion.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

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Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

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Communism is a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state (or nation state).

So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property. If the society is devoid of private property, then the question remains what kind of socialism is it (is there money? Markets? Social classes? A state?).

China isn't even socialist by this definition, but even if it was, it would still be miles away from communist.

Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.

They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.

The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.

The scale of fraud was huge.

"A show trial is a public trial in which the guilt or innocence of the defendant has already been determined. The purpose of holding a show trial is to present both accusation and verdict to the public, serving as an example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors."

Has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the verdict, it's just a specific type of trial with a specific purpose.