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I understand acquittal as a legal concept but were they narrowly acquitted or was it a slam-dunk acquittal? And did that acquittal turn on factual or legal matters?
Also, what came of the motor vehicle accident? Did the car and driver just disappear into the ether (suspicious) or is there a legal docket somewhere in Cambridge where some old lady is gonna be tried for grossly negligent driving resulting in grave injury (or whatever the equivalent English charge is).
I feel otherwise you're handing us a tiny sliver of half-baked facts and just wanting people to run with it.
Apart from the minutia of the search and rescue efforts for the capsized ship, there's not much additional detail in any English Language reporting I could find. Apart from that, there's a lot of conspiratorial speculation about the timings of both deaths, but again without adding any more information. The added stuff about the legal background below helps.
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Unfortunately, it's not very easy to tell the difference between those two ends from the public record. There's a lot of lawfare about specific testimony, but that... doesn't really mean much, and from a quick glance it doesn't look like any big decisions happened over technicalities from a judge's perspective.
Their CFO, Sushovan Hussain, was convicted of a ton of counts of wire fraud, so it's pretty clear that someone was making something up. It doesn't cover near the full 8bn USD gap, but it's at least sizable enough to explain some sort of otherwise-unreasonable conclusion. Lynch-Chamberlain's defense was that Hussain had handled the money and documents in question, and that neither Chamberlain nor Lynch were (proven to be) aware he was lying, or to the extent Chamberlain futzed some numbers that they were not done to induce HP's deal. The lawfirm for Lynch highlighted the weakness of a major witness for the government, but I'll caveat that this is a very lawyer take on things.
Whether it's scuzzy is a bit easier: yes, absolutely. The indictment looks a lot worse for Lynch than Chamberlain, and not all allegations in an indictment are true -- one charge got tossed as unsupported by the evidence, which takes some fucking up -- but most look like they'd be prone to problems more of the sort "did HP depend on this" or "what this done for potential buyers" rather than "did this show good compliance with financial best-practices". At best, Lynch as CEO and Chamberlain as VP of Finance managed to miss tens of millions of dollars in not-quite-honest claims by their CFO; more likely, they at least futzed with the truth, if not necessarily to the point of it being covered by a law.
Maybe the latter, but apparently 49-year-old?:
One of the problems with prosecuting this type of case is that there is no command responsibility under civilian criminal law, so although you can assume the founder-CEO (who will get by far the largest personal payoff and so has the motive) is the actual guilty party, you can't prosecute him unless you can prove (beyond reasonable doubt) that he was personally involved in some specific crime. A good criminal CEO (like a good mafia boss) tells his subordinates "make the numbers work, I understand that you might need to fudge them a bit, I don't need to know the details". Even a mediocre one knows not to write things down when criming. And any criminal CEO can turn up at trial and say they are shocked, shocked to find that their CFO is a crook. RICO mostly stops this defence working in a mafia case, but it doesn't apply to corporate fraud.
And in practice the only way to win a case against the CEO is to flip the CFO (who can't avoid hands-on criming given the nature of their role in the scheme, and so usually gets charged first) on him. The classic example is Enron, where Fastow flipped on Lay and Skilling in exchange for a relatively lenient sentence. Lay and Skilling's defence was indeed "We didn't know what Fastow was doing so we can't be criminally liable for it." I don't know why Hussain didn't take a plea deal (based on the reported appeal, he didn't have much of a defence) but his going to trial probably sunk the case against his boss. Under the civil standard things are easier - HP won their civil case in England against Lynch personally.
Personally I favour a RICO-like law for large-scale corporate crime where a CEO can be convicted of running a systemically criminal company even it isn't proven that they personally knew about specific crimes. CEOs in general, and founder-CEOs in particular, have enough power over their own companies that command responsibility applies morally, and I think the law should align. If you genuinely know so little about your own company that it can be as corrupt as Enron or Autonomy without you being involved, then you should resign (as a non-owner CEO) or sell it (as a founder-CEO).
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Thanks for the insight here.
That's a nuanced position. And I understand that one can conclude that even if they didn't (quite) break the law, they were less than honest in the commission of their legal obligations.
This does not sound like the behavior of a deep state super assassin. If true, this would update against foul play.
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