Corporate fraud has become widespread because of indifference

Shyam 

Your free-thinking reader, Sashi Kiran, in effect, asks the obvious questions: 

- Why - when companies like 'Agrigold Properties' , etc. are fronts for absurd, but nonetheless pernicious, frauds - have the Indian police and regulators not taken swift action against their bosses?

- Why has the mainstream Indian media not tried to warn the public? 

However the same obvious questions could be asked in dozens of different countries around the world, and about thousands of similarly fake companies. In reality, the overwhelming majority of  police officers, regulators and journalists are just as likely to be completely baffled by this type of fraud as anyone else. Yet, the simple test to determine the true nature of any commercial enterprise is to establish whether it consistently generates significant, lawful, external profits. Currently, the world is full of racketeers peddling ill-informed persons infinite shares of their own finite money. These crooks have been allowed to hide closed market swindles by pretending that they pursue commercial enterprises which consistently generate significant, lawful, external profits. Unfortunately, in the light of all the evidence, anyone in India who continues to believe that they live in a democracy defended by a courageous, independent media and governed by laws drafted to protect the people, and which are enforced by public servants who couldn’t be so dozy, and/or corrupt, as to allow  gangs of racketeers to use corporate structures to steal from the people and avoid being held to account, cannot be more wrong. Even if well-informed mainstream journalists were to try to expose this type of fraud, it's very doubtful if their editors would want to boadcast the full truth for fear of being drawn into costly lawsuits, and/or losing advertising revenue. 

With the benefit of hindsight, the Wall Street ‘liar-loans’ a.k.a. ‘subprime’ scandal of 2007  (in which trillions of dollars were unlawfully generated via the peddling of effectively-worthless pieces of paper arbitrarily defined as ‘secure investments’) could have been limited, if not prevented, by US regulators; that is, had fully-accountable and insightful individuals been employed in key posts actually to police the markets rigorously, and without fear or favour. Since it is now a matter of public record that this titanic American-based fraud - fronted by thought-stopping technical jargon and a labyrinth of legally-registered corporate structures - triggered the current, world economic crisis (the full-effects of which are, as yet, unknown), most reasonable observers would imagine that, at the very least, the discovery of such a potentially-catastrophic financial crime against humanity should have set loud alarm-bells ringing in government offices around the world, but no! To my certain knowledge, when they are not sleeping on the job, most national regulators still prefer to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil - on the idle-minded assumption that 'Amway' is an influential, but highly-controversial, labyrinth of American-controlled corporate structures, which has pursued a dubious, but technically-lawful, commercial enterprise when, in reality, this is only because 'Amway's' bosses retain unlimited amounts of stolen cash to hide the truth that it never has, and because selectively deaf, dumb, blind and possibly corrupt, key US officials have not nailed them for fronting less-than-titanic fraud, and/or racketeering, years ago. 

David Brear (copyright 2011)