The US UK extradition treaty is a product of post 9/11 and comically imbalanced as persons may be extradited from the UK to the US for crimes committed in the UK which would be a crime in the US but not the opposite. See further: https://www.stokoepartnership.com/bambos-tsiattalou-discusse...
A US person can be federally charged for violating a foreign law while overseas. The example used when I read of this was a guy convicted for wrapping lobsters for shipment in Nicaragua in wax paper instead of a bag (or something along those lines).
It was very strange because the violation in Nicaragua was a misdemeanor, but the US law for committing a crime is a felony.
Maybe I am getting this wrong but that is not the opposite.
I think OP said: An UK citizen can be extradicted from the UK to the US just by having done a thing that it is illegal in the US but not in the UK.
You said: An US citizen can be charged in the US if he committed a crime abroad even if that thing is not typified as illegal in the US.
Wake me up when an US citizen is extradicted to the UK because he did something perfectly legal in Washington but which is considered a crime in London.
>Wake me up when an US citizen is extradicted to the UK because he did something perfectly legal in Washington but which is considered a crime in London.
If it were the case, I suppose tens of millions of US people could be extradited that way given the differences in free speech laws - a lot of what is said in US is probably a crime [IANAL] in UK :)
He also provided 0 citations to people being extradited from the UK for a crime in the US that isn't a crime in the UK. Reading the actual content of the agreement in question I can't find anything remotely close to that text in it.
I think it must be difficult to find something that fits that distinction out of all major cases, basically the things that are illegal and not misdemeanors in one western democracy are probably illegal in the others - the only thing that jumps to mind are laws related to fascism in Germany.
That sounds like the lobster seller was charged under the notoriously broad Lacy Act, which I have heard most often in arguments that is is impossible to be cognizant of everything that is illegal in the US, since this law roughly imports foreign laws. My understanding is it makes it a federal crime to trade in wildlife or plants that are illegal under the laws of a state, a Native American tribe, or any foreign law.
But it is limited to trade of plants and animals, not meant as a general extradition agreement or to import _all_ foreign laws.
And not just living plants, but also (quite dead) wood and products derived from wood, apparently especially if the CEO donated to the opposing political party (the GOP):
Apart from being poorly OCR'd, this article espouses a conspiracy theory that the actual facts on the ground just don't support. Gibson violated U.S. Customs law by accepting shipments of wood that they knew were mislabeled at the port of entry [1].
Both Martin and Taylor ran far, far away from this scheme.
Gibson absolutely deserved the whacking they got.
You can get around these problems in a legal way and be somewhat responsible. Taylor, famously, bought all the ebony stands in the world and promised to buy all ebony at the same price because the local population were cutting down rare ebony trees and leaving them to rot if they didn't have black heartwood. This, of course, creates a monopoly which is its own problem ... however, any solution you come up with has to take into account that the locals will destroy the extremely rare ebony trees for absurdly small (to us) amounts of money.
You can work within the legal frameworks, and Gibson has more than enough staff to be able to comply. Gibson isn't some tiny company that unjustly trod by the government. Had you or I done this, we would be rotting in jail. Gibson merely got a fine and even got its wood back.
"At one point in the saga, Juszkiewicz was told by government agents he could make his problems go away if he used foreign labor for manufacturing."
Wow--
(I do get we should not be importing endangered s pieces of wood. This seems like someone overreacted? I guess the moral of the story is don't play around with the feds?)
> I do get we should not be importing endangered s pieces of wood. This seems like someone overreacted?
Exotic wood is in many ways like conflict diamonds. It funds some quite horrible people who will denude a country of its exotic wood if allowed--we have seen this in action already.
Enforcement is far easier on the US side than on the origin side--which is normally some corrupt as hell dictatorship with people who are brutally poor.
> The evidence at trial demonstrated that for more than two years prior to the sale, Hussain, 55, a citizen and resident of the United Kingdom, used sophisticated accounting methods to falsely inflate Autonomy’s revenues to make it appear Autonomy was growing when it really was not. Specifically, Hussain used backdated contracts, roundtrips, channel stuffing, and other forms of accounting fraud to fraudulently inflate Autonomy’s publicly-reported revenues by as much as 14.6% in 2009, 17.9% in 2010, 21.5% in the first quarter of 2011, and 12.4% in the second quarter of 2011.
Sounds like something that would potentially be criminal in the jurisdiction in which the company operated, and for whom any questions of interpretation of accounting as criminal or otherwise would be wholly circumscribed: that jurisdiction is the UK.
Nothing - especially a US-style "plea bargain" of trumped up charges threatening long incarceration unless the victim pleads 'guilty' to them, akin to torture in the worthlessness of any admission or incrimination of others so obtained - combined with jurisdictional overreach, this should be laughed out of court in the UK.
I'm slightly confused, and forgive my ignorance: how do you channel stuff software? I mean, granted this is 2009 - 2011, but even back then were Autonomy really selling software as a physically packaged good, or is there some way that virtual goods can be channel stuffed? (E.g., selling a shedload of license keys to resellers, many of which remain unsold to end users? Would that be something that even applied to the software Autonomy made?)
EDIT: Similarly, for roundtripping, doesn't there need to be another company or companies involved? Doesn't there have to be some collusion? And if so, who are these other parties and why aren't we hearing about them?
EDIT 2: This might explain the channel stuffing comment, and provide some mechanism for it: "fraudulently concealed from investors and market analysts the scale of Autonomy’s hardware sales".
I am a bit familiar with Autonomy, but I don’t know the exact specifics. They were in the software license business, so if I were to speculate, they would get a new channel partner and then forward them 250 server licenses, book the full revenue during that quarter, and then the partner has to sell all the licenses. But that could possibly take years. Repeat with a handful of fresh partners and you could book a significant amount of revenue growth. Given Autonomy had access to huge amounts of credit, money could have been fronted and exchanged to make these transactions look very legitimate and this could have been lucrative for the partner.
The roundtripping is not very clear. Maybe the same thing thru one of their acquisition companies?
America shouldn't be allowed to extradite and prosecute people who have not committed crimes in America. They'd never allow it in reverse. Also the justice system there doesn't inspire confidence.
I agree. There was a horrendous incident recently in the UK where an American woman drove the wrong way up a particular road and ran over a teenager. Somehow she was spirited out of the country and now the US refuse to extradite her.
You’re talking about Anne Sacoolas. There’s more to it: she’s a spook, and she fled on board of US military plane, lying about having diplomatic immunity.
She had diplomatic immunity. There is a lot of bad reporting in that case.
The US always puts it diplomats back on a plane ASAP after that sort of incident. My buddy in the foreign service ran someone over while on a tour and they did exactly the same thing. Back on the next flight out.
It sounds callous, but the person would otherwise become a scapegoat for the US.
Indeed, the US tends to protect its criminals from justice, as long as they work for the government. It’s not callous, though, it’s just bullying. The “scapegoat” argument could make sense in a few countries without proper judicial system, but obviously doesn’t make sense with European countries.
The "scapegoat" argument makes sense here too. Mrs. Sacoolas was seen as a personification of Trump's foreign policy. People were calling for her head, for an crime that generally doesn't even receive jail time (in the UK or USA).
People don't normally get incensed over non-DUI car accidents.
People were out for blood because her husband and allegedly she worked for US intelligence agencies. If she was just a tourist who forgot which side of the road she was supposed to drive on the case would just be in the local papers.
You can see it in this thread on hacker news. THEY WERE SPOOKS! STRING EM UP. Uh, no, they were working on a joint intelligence mission with the UK. The vast majority of intelligence workers are analysts and support staff not little green men.
No, people wanted blood because she avoided all responsibility by lying about diplomatic immunity and fleeing the country. Nobody would say a thing if she did have a minimum of dignity and didn’t behave like a professional criminal.
The only reason for mentioning her being a spook is how she used that fact to escape.
Both the State Department and the UK High Court agreed she did.
The US and UK even changed the rule to remove diplomatic immunity from spouses of people at that base after the incident (but not retroactively), which proves she did have it at the time.
I’m not aware of High Court determining that. I’m aware of American court proving that she didn’t. The State Department doesn’t have any reason not to lie, given that they facilitated her escape.
Yes - my understanding is she was the wife of a spoon and didn't have diplomatic immunity? I agree perhaps there is more to it, but still it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
She (and US officials I think?) lied that she was a diplomat’s wife and thus had immunity. The fact that she’s herself a spook - and thus didn’t have immunity - was discovered later, during the trial.
FWIW, for the International audience, the (excellent) UK series "Spooks" was renamed "MI-5" - it was all about the domestic intelligence services in the UK, and (IMHO) worth looking for on NetFlix...
There are conflicting reports on her diplomatic immunity and whether she was still employed as a spy (she was definitely employed by the US govt at the time, and as a spy in the past). So it's not as simple as saying she didn't have it or she lied about it. Looks to me like a complicated legal matter.
At least the US State Dept position is that she did have diplomatic immunity.
That’s exactly the point since otherwise there would be more opportunities for false flag attacks on, or by, diplomats overriding a non absolute immunity.
That might the point for some third world countries, and the US, which openly protect their criminals (usually war criminals) from justice.
With more civilized countries, the idea is that the person accused is still being tried, but in its country court, with the assumption that if they are guilty, they will get sentenced anyways.
Has a US company that deals with a Chinese one be considered to have committed a crime in China if the Chinese decide they have broken one of their laws? And in such a case what are peoples feelings about extradition?
Usually when countries disagree significantly on law, they just don't sign extradition agreements. It takes at least two countries to make this decision. The US has not signed such an agreement, and thus, it doesn't matter what China thinks.
> when countries disagree significantly on law, they just don't sign extradition agreements
That isn't about "compatibility" of the laws. The US has extradition treaties with pretty much all of their allies but the conditions are mainly dictated by the US given their stronger position.
No country's laws condones war crimes and yet no international court even tried prosecuting any case of suspected war crimes committed by the US military because of things like this [0].
I'm not talking about disagreements in the minutia of law. I'm talking about "disagreement" of law in a broad context. Extraditions to the US, even from countries with which the US has a treaty, are not always honored.
My point is that it's not a one-way street. Countries extradite because they think it's in their best interest.
> Countries extradite because they think it's in their best interest
Indeed and that was my point. Treaties are signed despite significant disagreements in the law, that's not the driving factor you made it out to be earlier. The EU and the US historically disagreed significantly on things like the death penalty or drug related crimes yet the extradition treaties were readily signed. But interests are better served by avoiding retaliation.
As a US resident, if I rolled a large boulder downhill and fatally crushed a small child across the Mexican or Canadian border, would I be liable to extradition?
Again, this is something that only happens one way: if any other country was arbitrarily claiming immunity for their agent who murdered someone in the US, like the US did here, the US would carpet bomb them.
The morally correct way would be probably to go full Mossad and either kidnap, or disappear the perpetrator, but that can’t happen for political reasons. Same reason why Blackwater terrorists avoid consequences.
> jurisdiction depends on where the crime was committed
No, it doesn't. Sovereignty is inherently unlimited. Jurisdiction depends on the law of the party seeking to exercise it. Bringing someone before the court with jurisdiction may sometimes require external cooperation, but the terms of that are products of diplomacy; there's no hard and fast universal rules.
This is a maximalist view of sovereignty that happens to be common in very few countries on the planet, namely the ones not afraid to use violence against anyone stating the opposite: the US, China, Russia, and a handful of rogue states.
> This is a maximalist view of sovereignty that happens to be common in very few countries on the planet
Its actually obligatory under treaties of near universal acceptance; though of course nations are free (and some do) choose not to exercise jurisdiction beyond their borders outside of those areas where treaty requires it. Though I think the more common choice is to apply jurisdiction both to citizens/nationals irregardless of location for at least some offenses as well as general jurisdiction over national territory.
Its true that some countries, like the US, are more inclined than others to assert non-obligatory jurisdiction over acts by foreigners on foreign territory.
> Its actually obligatory under treaties of near universal acceptance;
Of course - such treaties, in order to be ratified by as many countries as possible, go for the minimum common denominator, which must be able to accomodate the views of such maximalists too.
Also, to be fair, the ranks of these maximalists tends to change with the fortunes of military power. France and UK, for example, used to be much more aggressive in claiming entitlements.
Oh yes, those poor weak British. History has been so unkind to them, torturing them so in their forever weakness. If only they were, just once, in a great position of power.
> The treaty has been claimed to be one-sided[3] because it allows the US to demand extradition of British citizens and other nationals for offences committed against US law, even though the alleged offence may have been committed in the UK by a person living and working in the UK (see for example the NatWest Three), and there being no reciprocal right; and issues about the level of proof required to extradite from the UK to the US versus from the US to the UK.[4]
What do you mean "wrong"? They expressed an opinion, not a fact.
That you shouldn't be able to be extradited to a country you have nothing to do with, is something I agree with as well, but I wouldn't say it's "true". What is true today is that many countries have treaties to allow them to basically kidnap citizens of other countries. If you think that's good/bad, you should argue for one of those viewpoints, not necessarily if it's true/false.
> But Dr Lynch has argued that HP used the allegations to cover up its own mismanagement of Autonomy after the 2011 deal.
I have no comment to make on Mike Lynch's guilt or innocence in this matter, because I simply don't know enough about him or about Autonomy (despite working in an office just across the road for 3 years leading up to the sale)[0], but tough to argue that HP wasn't mismanaged during this period, and therefore tough to assert that this mismanagement wouldn't have extended to Autonomy. Could this have made HP easier to dupe, or did they not get duped and just do a bad job? It's going to be weird if the outcomes of the civil and criminal cases end up disagreeing on this point.
And I think whatever the outcome, it reflects badly on HP: if he's not guilty then it adds weight to his assertion about mismanagement, and if he is guilty then it means they were duped during DD (and may in addition have mismanaged Autonomy). Neither of these is a good look.
[0] I do know a handful of people who have worked with and for Mike Lynch: some of them really rated him, some really don't. It's about what you'd expect for a prominent business executive. As I say, I have no basis on which to form any kind of opinion of him.
> tough to argue that HP wasn't mismanaged during this period, and therefore tough to assert that this mismanagement wouldn't have extended to Autonomy
How is this relevant? If you get sold a computer, are delivered a turtle, and then kill it because you forgot to feed it, it can simultaneously be true that you were (a) incompetent and (b) defrauded.
In the context of DD, it's possible that these items were disclosed to HP and HP simply didn't care/think through what was going on.
If the actions weren't criminal, but instead the result of a CEO/company not using accounting best practices/pushing too aggressively then HP may not have a civil or criminal case.
The time that Microsoft failed to acquire Skype's IP comes to mind.
That said, I don't believe that was why Skype lost relevance after Microsoft bought them: Microsoft was seemingly intent on compromising the Skype UX to promote the then-named Windows Live service - and they didn't combat the problems with spam on the service - and the ill-advised and ultimately reversed decision to force-convert Skype accounts into Windows Live accounts in a hamfisted way that left me personally with 3 duplicated accounts and no easy way of managing them - especially after they decreed that Skype will only support 1 account per Windows account in their flagship Windows 8-exclusive client and remove secondary instances from the legacy client, and the list goes on...
...I'd summarise it as them alienating their own fanbase and the tech-thought-leader community, which led to them (us?) seeking different platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Skype quickly becoming irrelevant.
When they relaunched Skype's new desktop client as an Electron app I knew they had stopped caring about it - because they immediately lost all of the advantages of having platform-specific clients, which is especially useful for video-conferencing due to the limitations imposed by Chromium (which are far better now than they were, but still...)
Unpopular opinion: The Skype brand was critical to getting decent uptake in Lync (rebranded as Skype For Business) and these users were migrated across to Microsoft Teams which has been overwhelmingly popular (at least in the UK it’s the de-facto conference app).
It’s not totally clear to me that Microsoft would actually be doing well in the space without the Skype aquisition, but considering they bought Skype for 8.5bn and Zoom now has a market cap of 100bn my assumption is that Teams is valuable and maybe the price was worth paying.
Because nothing is that black and white. As regards the civil case you must be able to show harm. If I sell you a house with a foundation that is only built to last 10 years and then you burn the house down, you can't sure me for damages so long as the crummy foundation had nothing to do with the house burning down. To win damages you must be able to show harm. So the entire civil case hinges on the root of the poor performance of the company after purchase.
On the criminal side it's all going to hinge on whether the accounting practices rise to the level of fraud. That's trickier to nail down than you may think because a certain amount of liberty is often taken in trying to project growth, future earnings, etc. HP is likely going to present the subsidiary's poor performance as evidence that the accounting did rise above the level of normal wiggle room. The defense will surely attack that argument.
But as long as HP had access to enough of the company's finincial documents to identify the accounting practices in question it will be hard to prove out and out fraud.
Edit: ENRON is a good example because as clear cut as people believe that fraud was, it wasn't so obvious at the time. Writing down future contracts as earnings wasn't unheard of. They just followed that logic to an unsustainable conclusion. Which in the end clearly was fraud but it took hundreds of small steps and it's hard to say exactly when it did become fraud.
It's relevant to HP and their shareholders, and it's relevant because there is an ongoing civil case in the UK, which makes this situation on criminal charges in the US more interesting and unusual, and finally it's foundational to Mike Lynch's argument with HP[0].
It's entirely possible that we might see different outcomes in these cases. Maybe a difference in outcome between civil and criminal cases is a more common occurrence than I'm aware of (certainly O. J. Simpson springs to mind), but it seems unusual to me, and especially across international boundaries.
[0] Again, I haven't followed these goings on that carefully, but my impression is he's hewn pretty closely to this line of argument throughout.
I also have no real knowledge about the situation, but it's also plausible for the two to be related: that is, you were easy to defraud because of your incompetence. Which of course doesn't make the perpetrator any less culpable.
Autonomy always seemed to sail pretty closed to the wind. Around 2000 they came to me to see if I would buy their semantic doc indexing thing for a dotcom I was IT director of. I said it was quite expensive and we didn't need it. They then came back with a proposal where we would buy some expensive HP SAN disk drives (that we also didn't need), they would throw the text index thing in "for free" and they claimed it would be worth our while because we would be able to write off the depreciation on the shitty disk drives against tax. I said it seemed really sketchy and I didn't want the maintenance burden of an additional SAN solution to look after.
I tried using Autonomy's NLP product at work in (about) 2001. It had good functionality but when I later heard what HP was paying for Autonomy, I was flabbergasted at what I thought was a very high price for their IP and software. I had no inside information of Autonomy except for trying their product, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.
They had a lot of big customers. In the web 1.0 days, Autonomy was the de facto search platform for any big enterprise project. It was the Oracle of search. Similarly, I did quite of projects using the Interwoven suite of products that were acquired by Autonomy. The software was really not very impressive, but it was functional enough and had loads of deep-pocketed customers.
As the article says, the deal was already investigated by the UK and they dropped all charges back in 2013. It is weird for the US DoJ to pick it up now, obviously on the behest of a large American corporation.
I want to agree, but the problem I have this particular case is that it seems that it's only being taken seriously only because the affected party is a massive US corporation. The US is going after someone from another country because he ripped off a bunch of rich people, but still, no one responsible for the 2008 financial crisis has been punished.
Frankly I don't think anyone should be extradited to the USA. I just have zero confidence in the US legal system.
Prosecutions seem politically motivated. Punishments are unreasonably harsh (I suspect to drive plea deals over actual trials). The quality of your defence depends entirely on how much you have to spend. And there seems to be a weird bias making prosecution and conviction of foreigners more likely for no reason beyond them being foreign. The US also seems to like extradition for people who's crimes didn't even happen in America.
This case seems very much to fit that last criteria. If the deal was subject to British law, why isn't any accusation of fraud?
It doesn't help that our (I'm a brit) extradition agreement with the US seems filled with its own issues (extradition requires no evidence and doesn't seem to allow the usual defences). That's without getting into the humanity of us prison system.
Edit: Being down voted on HN is really annoying because it won't let you reply if your down voted. Even to replies to your comment. Thanks for your comments, I'll try and reply tomorrow!
The Serious Fraud Office has corruption problems; so I wouldn’t expect much justice out of them at all.
Mike Lynch is the bad guy in this. Autonomy was an intentional fraud that was offloaded into HP - with the help of Goldman Sachs and Meg Whitman (if my memory serves correctly.) The fraud was well known in the small Cambridge tech community as their former workers warned others about it. It’s hard to overstate the effect Autonomy had on the UK tech scene. It split my former peers along ethical lines.
As bad as US justice is; in this case it may still be better than the UK.
At one point Miles asked Apotheker why he hadn't read Autonomy's most recent financial results around the time of the deal, asking incredulously: "You didn't have 30 minutes?" Apotheker responded: "I was running a $125 billion company, sir, and minutes are pretty precious."[1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/leo-apotheker-abandon-11-bil...
It's not obvious why it's bad that anyone can be shipped off to another country (potentially with a much worse criminal justice system than their home) without any evidence being presented..?
* In the uk you'll get police bail for almost all accusations (police bail means meaning released from jail, agreeing not to contact other people involved and not to leave the country). In the US I don't think you get bail, except for cash bail? And even then, you cannot go home or go to work, you're stuck in the US awaiting trial. Bye bye job. Bye bye marriage maybe given how long US trials, appeals, counter appeals etc are.
* The US and UK have pretty different justice systems. If you were dragged to the UK for trial, you can forget attorney client privilege. Or any real challenges to the evidence against you. Illegally collected evidence is still admissible here and if you confess to your solicitor, he has to plead guilty for you and inform the other side.
* Also, there are a lot of things that aren't crimes in one country but are in the other. Should you think about English law before you take actions in America? What if you're drunk in a field with your cow? That's illegal in the uk. Fancy coming over to be tried for it?
* the above leads to anothet issue: you can use extradition to bypass the constitution. You can be prosecuted for critiquing the president right, 1st amendment? Only you can, German makes it illegal to criticise foreign leaders, so Biden or Trump can ask them to extradite you, and have you tried there. Even though you've (presumably) never been to Germany. Sound good?
Extradition usually requires some evidence (the same as being charged locally). It seems weird the police won't have enough to hold me overnight, but I can be bundled onto a flight just because.
Extradition usually requires your crime to be committed in the place you're going for trial. That's partly to avoid stupid laws (ever critisized the king of Thailand? That's a capital crime over there) and party to make it clear who prosecutes (england prosecutes crimes in England where they're our problem, ditto the USA).
I won't comment on his guilt/innocent. I don't know either way.
My smile is bemused/embarrassed that we've reached a point where he will go and stand trial in another country for an allegation of something that happened here, and whether he is found innocent or guilty won't really effect my opinion of him because my faith in the system is that low.
> Being down voted on HN is really annoying because it won't let you reply if your down voted. Even to replies to your comment. Thanks for your comments, I'll try and reply tomorrow!
I've been rate limited. Its taken me 60min of hitting reply to you to get this comment in How come that only happens when I have a down voted comment so I just assumed.
Error message: You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
I have the occasional comment that goes negative and it’s never been an issue whatsoever.
It’s possible then that HN has some other criteria that are limiting you? Possibly you go negative very often or something. I’ve also not hit a rate limit before either, though I rarely comment super densely.
Who knows? There is a page someone put together somewhere that I think addresses some of the HN automated rules I think but I can't find it quickly.
The point is, being an arsehole is my right and asking about it is a hippa violation and my name is Karen and I want to speak to the manager! /s
Edit: thinking about it, I have been quite unpopular recently as I'm not super on board with big tech being evil or monopolies law being the right tool to fix it...
The HN software increases the rate limit threshold for posters that meet certain criteria that are designed to try to catch those not participating in constructive discourse. How effective the filters are, I cannot say, but that's the intention.
Maybe because in the US prosecutors are elected / directly appointed by politicians, whereas in Europe they are in generally part of a self-selecting career bureaucracy.
What a fascinating time for search companies. We saw 2 companies with huge accounting irregularities purchased by large enterprise software vendors. The story behind Fast's acquisition by Microsoft is just as crazy. It was called the "Enron of Norway" https://techcrunch.com/2008/07/03/did-the-enron-of-norway-pu..., and happened just 3 years prior!
Autonomy acquired Verity, they were the largest enterprise search company out there and HP had high hopes with their e-discovery solutions paired with storage. They didn't learn from Microsoft's mistake.
>Dr Lynch said no defence witnesses turned up to Mr Hussain's trial because they were told they would be arrested if they entered the US.
and i guess some of his witnesses would be facing the same. A fair trial so to speak.
It is pretty telling that HP and US would like to have the guy prosecuted in US instead of UK - i mean i'm pretty sure that the alleged fraudulent inflation of the company valuation is a crime in UK too, and as it was supposedly committed in UK, it would be only natural to prosecute it in UK, yet they want to do it in US.
No worries though - i'm pretty sure that the guy flies a lot, and it is only a matter of time before US Marshals divert his plane into US airspace and the justice gets served cold.
As far as I can tell US prisons (in generally, not necessary all but I think most) are basically a heap of human right violations.
In that context I think extraditing anyone to the US should be treated as a human right violation and as such should not be done.
And even if we ignore their prisons from a German Law POV a lot of their law is fundamentally in conflict with the values represented by the constitution and might also be in conflict with the human right charter, which at least for Germany (and potentially other countries, too) is another reason why extradition to the US should not be allowed.
If a country does not obey human rights charters I don't think we'll send you to one of our good prisons really works, because that a prison is good is just a happenstance and there is no legal reason why it should continue to be good.
I'm not sure that UK prisons are a huge amount higher in quality having read news reports about them. Though state controlled they're far from being the nordic model of rehabilitation.
That said, a similar argument does prevent the UK from extraditing anyone accused of a capital crime due to the death penalty being banned in the UK.
He’s not going to those kinds of prisons no matter what, if anything, he is convicted of.
White collar crimes done by rich people go to white collar prisons. If you or I did this on a smaller scale we would probably go to regular prison but not a billionaire.
The kind of prison he goes to will depend on the length of his sentence. Federal prisons have a reputation for being relatively tame, but this is only true at the minimum security level. Inmates with more than 10 years on their sentences cannot be placed at minimum security facilities, however.
The remainder of the security levels - low, medium, and high - are the the kinds of places you see in movies with all of the attending violence, sexual assaults, and generally nightmarish life.
In the federal system, sentences for fraud are based on amount of loss. For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison - and there is no parole in the federal system. That length of sentence would require him to be kept at a high or medium security facility until his death - natural or otherwise - even though his crime was technically white collar.
Basically, if he is extradited to the US, he will never see the light of day, and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. So deciding to extradite him is a really big decision. It’s not just a slap on the wrist - it’s torture until he dies.
> For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison
Well, none of the charges has a life sentence available, so that option is not possible. It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years, but I haven't bothered to pull out the sentencing guidelines and see if, even, with $11 billion in frauds, that's likely without factors not obvious from the charges.
> and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies.
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years
Is that not effectively a life sentence without the possibility of parole? So the point of your response is to point out that he will not get life, but rather, up to 280 years?
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day? Rapes occur daily in prisons. He might not get raped every day, but he almost certainly will over 280 years in a high security prison (since you claim that is not a life sentence). The rape problem in US prisons is so bad that there is actually a law called PREA - the Prison Rape Elimination Act [1].
I see that pedantry is still alive and well among some on HN.
> Is that not effectively a life sentence without the possibility of parole?
The claim was that he would be sentenced to life or hundreds od years based on the charges and the amount in controversy. I was pointing out that while the second option may be at least theoretically possible, the first was not.
(Are the two practically equivalent? Sure, but the claim was that the charges would support either sentence, not that it would support a sentence materially ewut to life in prison.)
> You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day?
I’m pointing out that depending on which rumored horrors you consider, they might never occur in reality at all (rumor and fact arr different things), and even the ones that are factual horrors might never occur to the vast majority of prisoners, and even ones that are more common might never impact a particular prisoner and, yes, even the ones that happen to impact a particular prisoner often don’t do so daily, so the claim that he would be subjected to every rumored horror of US prisons every day of his sentence relies on so many levels of hyberbole as to be beyond absurd.
People harp on China or North Korea being police states but the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation by a significant margin. The US justice system is rife with discrimination and the prison conditions are dire (as you point out). People should absolutely not be extradited to the USA until this changes.
You need to drop North Korea from that to make any sense at all. Not only do they incarcerate far more people per capita than the US, but the conditions make US prison seem like paradise. No exaggeration.
Prison in North Korea is much closer in spirit and implementation to Nazi concentration camps during the second World War, or the Soviet gulags. Many people die within months of being sent there.
>Many people die within months of being sent there.
I take your overall point, but here in the US police just execute people on the streets and then face no consequences for doing so. I continue to think the comparison fits.
No. Trying to say they're somehow equivalent is whataboutism, it's insulting to the US and demeaning to survivors of North Korea. I know the US is not perfect, but you can't just go saying it's like North Korea.
No. It's another name for tu quoque, a logical fallacy by attempting to deflect criticism through pointing out hypocrisy. The Soviets used it as their go-to defense for their hideous system by pointing to racism, prisons, lynching, etc in the US. As if that made their shortcomings acceptable.
You can criticize some party or entity all you want, just make a logical argument free of fallacies. I don't abide using whataboutism to make false equivalencies. The US is nothing like North Korea. To compare the two, unless done extremely carefully, is insulting to people in the US, and demeaning the experience of people in North Korea.
To think of it another way, if you compare working in McDonald's to slavery, you're insulting the people that work for McDonald's and demeaning the experience of survivors of actual slavery.
TFA does not mention DPRK, and this is the only subthread on this page that does. So, bringing this totally different nation into the discussion is itself fallacious.
We do incarcerate a lot, however, keep in mind some of it has to do with the dismantling of the equally problematic mental health institutions beginning in the late sixties.
Lots of people who would better be served in psychiatric units are housed in regular prisons.
There are historical factors which contribute to higher incarceration rates (poor, lack of opportunity, unemployment benefits structures (unreported income does not affect eligibility), etc which contribute to higher probability of running afoul of criminal law.
Moreover, you can see a marked increase from the '80s on. That strongly implies economic factors (in conjunction with Clinton's tough on crime agenda).
What precipitates this is the hollowing out of American jobs overseas. No longer could a high school graduate live on the income afforded by a HS graduate. As people's in the lower socio-economic rungs saw decreasing purchasing power, few alternatives were available to them. Steel Mills closed down, Shoe factories, Clothing, the FT cleaning crew was replaced by low wage imported labor, etc.
Some of the same reasons are seen in countries with populations of poor people. Belarus, Thailand, Bahamas, etc.
Looks like UK has a similar over-incarceration disparity though.
> People from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds constitute only 14% of the general population in England and Wales, but make up 25% of its prison population
>Lots of people who would better be served in psychiatric units are housed in regular prisons.
You know, people always say this, but they never think of things from the point of view of all the people in mental wards who are not criminals and are defenseless.
Also, modern mental wards do not house anyone for very long. So they just aren't applicable for long term housing.
People who are arrested do sometimes end up in psychiatric units temporarily, and once they are "stabilized" then they get back into the legal system.
Yea - but dismantling them was the wrong answer. It was the easy guiltless answer where everyone could pat themselves on the back, but mental health treatment is a service that society needs and trying to solve it with prisons is just a terrible idea.
The right answer was admitting and addressing those terrible abuses and fixing the system.
Prisons are NOT meant to take away your human rights, they will take away some of your rights temporary but that's not the same.
The main point of prisons is to temporary take away your freedom (which is often perceived as on of the most valuable rights) as a form of punishment for you crime, but that's where it stops.
You are sentenced to 10 years of prison not 10 years of torture, and potential random death.
If your arbitrary put people in solitary confinement, expose them to unnecessary risk from other inmates or risk of health due to absurd temperatures you are effectively arbitrary non lawfully adding additional punishments on top of the prison sentence a person has. Which is in direct conflict with what a state of law is supposed to be.
I mean lets say you committed a minor crime with a small prison sentence of but now you are forced to stay in a room which massively increases your chance of dying in the next few hours (heat+ heart disease), this means instead of being sentenced to 2 weeks of prison you are now sentenced to 2 weeks of prison + torture + a high chance to it arbitrary getting a death sentence.
Furthermore the worse the prison is the harder it gets to proper rehabilitate the person afterwards, which gets worse in the US due to treatments of ex-convicts. But again your sentence was 2 years in prison not 2 years in prison and hardly any chance to life a normal life afterwards even if you try.
The last point is even worse because it's not just bad for the convinced, it's especially bad for the rest of society which now has to coop with a increased crime rate as direct consequence of how prisons are handled. Which in turn will cause more people to be dragged into situations where they will commit crimes leading to a vicious crime increasing cycle.
There are more then just a few studies which relatively clearly show that treating prisoners as imprisoned but still human and help with rehabilitation will decrease effective crime rates and will in total benefit society, even if it might sometimes seem unfair in specific cases.
EDIT: To be clear the temperature is just one easy to understand example, but not the only problem and not applicable to all prisons. For people not aware of it, during very hot days some prisons get so hot that using ventilators or water vapor makes the situations worse, e.g. the are blown over by the ventilator is so hot that instead of giving your body a chance to cool it heats it up further.
Ok, I'll remember from now on that a comfortable temperature is an "inalienable right" whereas just general freedom is simply a "right of a citizen" or something.
The hoops people are jumping through to not acknowledge that prison is an explicit, intended violation of human rights are wild.
6 hours of cursory 'scrutiny' before they decided to blow £8bn on the acquisition... I wonder if the (now ex-) CEO would be interested in buying my house?
And what was the rest of the board doing when the CEO decoded to trample on due process to get the deal over the line in a hurry?
Interestingly, the KPMG report itself can be downloaded from the above site and I have given it a brief glance (thus surpassing Ms Lesjak's pre-purchase attention).
It is pretty clear from the caveats and predicating statements in the report (e.g. 'We make no representation for the sufficiency of your purposes of the procedures you selected, and those procedures will not necessarily disclose all significant matters about Target or reveal errors in the underlying information, instances of fraud, or illegal acts, if any.') that KPMG was saying 'Look, bud - you hired us in a very limited capacity, knowing the data was bad: the consequences of this going belly-up are gonna be your problem, not ours'. To be fair, this is probably par for the course in many transactions.
Page 26 even says 'We understand that your auditors may provide a grace period post acquisition to perform a more rigorous analysis using the industry accepted calculation methodology.' (Did they do this?)
HP was determined to buy without looking under the hood because it was afraid it would be pipped to the post by Oracle.
Subsequently, the Serious Fraud Office dropped an investigation against Lynch and Hussain (CFO) because of insufficient evidence.
38% is material enough to not just be a 'to-mah-toe / to-may-toe' difference of opinion, so maybe there are grounds for a further grilling of Mr Lynch.
However, given the clear incompetence of HP's board and the shoddy DD they did, and the fact that the SFO could not find grounds to pursue the case, I would have thought that handing over a UK citizen to the US when he was at the time of the deal managing a UK co listed on the London Stock Exchange seems to indicate undue pressure has been brought to bear on the junior partner in the 'special relationship'.
I won't have much sympathy for either the incompetent or the shady (if this is the case) if they wind up in a relationship that has gotten messy, but this does not reflect well on the extradition reciprocity of US and UK.
The SFO has a habit of not finding sufficient evidence, I wouldn’t read too much into that other than perhaps they too are incompetent. In my view they are also likely corrupt as well.
> "We are going after a 100 billion dollar market"
IANAL - That doesn't sound like fraud to me.
A highschool athlete saying 'they are going after attending the Olympics' isn't lying. A highschool athlete without Olympic experience saying 'they won a gold medal at the Olympics is lying.
The difference is that athlete actually has a plan to at least try for the Olympics, and could conceivably get to the goal.
The 100 billion dollar market will never be conquered by one company, and the pain point they are trying to solve often only applies to 1%-10% of that market and they know that, or they're BSing themselves.
Nah that's just like "your opinion, man" regardless of how realistic it is. That isn't fraud.
Saying something that happened or that exists that is also an untrue statement is required for it to go from opinion to fraud. Support your opinion with falsehoods to get a sale. Fraud? Talk about goals of being a trillion dollar revenue lemonade stand? Go nuts.
I worked at Autonomy a long time back. While I was never exposed to the accounting side, I find the allegations quite plausible - the company always played fast and loose, selling software that didn't exist yet, wildly overstating its capabilities, etc.
Can someone please explain why is this company any different than any US company? In my eyes they are all artificially inflated. I love Tesla for instance but please P/E ratio of 654.03 isn't that the same thing? (it is genuine question)
Tesla’s P/E is a function of stockholders inflating the stock price. The allegation here (by my limited understanding) is that Autonomy lied about how much revenue the business was actually generating. It’s not illegal to have your stock price inflated because of demand for the stock, but it is illegal to lie in your financial statements.
OK but how is that possible? Before you sell a company there is a long due diligence process, where all papers and everything else is given to inspection, and I can imagine team of 10 people lawyers accountants and experts going to every, note, paper and even paperclip.
Also isn't rule of market capitalism, if I am the seller I can put any price in the product/service I own, if you do not like my price you do not have to buy?!
The short answer is that HP didn’t identify the fraud when they did their due diligence. Just because you look at a businesses financials doesn’t mean you’ll identify fraud they are trying to hide.
As far as the seller determining the price, that’s true but the price they set is set on the basis that they aren’t lying about what they are selling you.
If someone sells you a pure gold box that turns out to just be aluminum wrapped in gold foil, that’s fraud even if you agreed to pay for the pure gold box. The seller did not provide the thing you agreed to pay for. It’s the same in this case, the seller allegedly lied about what they were selling to get HP to agree to an inflated price.
That scenario looks fishy to me, even when you buying second hand car you do bit of exploration and for buying something with price tag of £11,000,000,000 well you dig a bit deeper, and due diligence is not just going to your financial statements and what is usually accessibly in UK publicly.
During that process you dig trough everything, bank statements, expenses, salaries, earnings, revenue streams ... everything.
Personally, I think it is impossible HP has not seen something like that, or they have sent complete idiots to do due diligence.
I don't think you understand the complexity of this type of finance or the sophistication that's possible while committing fraud. These things are not necessarily simple to detect.
Maybe I don't as it must be some very sophisticated fraud when checking all in the following list they missed something like that.
" Corporate attorneys generally review all the company’s financial information from the last five years, including income statements, balance sheets, cash flow and audit reports. Other financial documents that may be reviewed include projections, budgets and forecasts for the financials of the next five years and assess whether they are reasonable. Finally, corporate attorneys generally review all credit agreements, debts and contingent liabilities. "
Presumably the folks regularly involved in the closing of 11 figure deals are capable of sniffing out deception. Though maybe the HP board cheaped out and hired the B team instead?
Because they were fabricating sales numbers, channel stuffing, misreporting expenses...Autonomy was a fraud, the numbers weren't real, the CFO is already doing time.
HP are big enough to hire anyone they like to do due-dilligence. Where is the negligence claim on who they did hire?
This was a listed company with audited financial statements. Where is the action against the auditors?
Americans generally hate hearing it but their courts a bit notorious for home-town decisions.
Anyway aside from that as Matt Levine is fond of telling us "Everything in the US is securities fraud." HP class action to follow. "The company management should have known it wasn't competent to do an acquisition and could be the victim of fraud to the tune of billions." I'll never get my head around an owner of the company joining the other owners of the company suing the company to be paid by the owners of the company.
edit: Never at all surprised to hear about financial dealings in the UK being potentially crooked.
> Mike Lynch sold Autonomy to US computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP) for $11bn in 2011.
> He denies allegations that he fraudulently inflated the value of Autonomy before the sale.
So the company is actually worth what? Let's say one half, $5 billion, and HP expects to make how much more? Let's say at least twice, $22 billion. That's a large margin. Unless they expected to make just $11.5 billion from it.
AFAIK it was good old fashioned accounting fraud. Losses booked as marketing expenses, lifetime revenue of contracts booked immediately, bundling overpriced software with underpriced hardware to change the revenue mix to get better valuation multiples. The fact that such blatant fraud could be missed for so long is an indictment of everyone involved.
While I think it’s unlikely she’ll face the justice she deserves, at least her intelligence career is likely in ruins. It’s hard to be an effective spy when most of an entire country a) is at least passively aware you exist and b) thinks you’re a complete piece of shit to the point the newspapers would know if you so much as fart. She still should be extradited and she still should be in prison, but in the whole heap of bullshit that’s UK-US extradition agreements we should take what comforts we can.
I’m usually quite the Atlanticist but in matters of extradition I think we should simply tear up those agreements. What’s the justice in the US being able to extradite autistic teenagers who’ve never set foot on American soil at the behest of MPAA and RIAA human scum, yet we can’t extradite a literal killer?
In the seemingly lopsided extradition treaty between the US and the UK.
(Which I was hesitant to comment on directly simply
because we risk veering away from the core focus of HN - which is arguably the technology angle of this story rather than UK/US extradition policies)
