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Comment by easytiger | Hacker News Reader

It is accurate from the perspective the investors actually made a lot of money out of him. Matt Levine sums it all up very well:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-12-17/martin-sh...

In short his hedge fund tanked, he started some new companies, retrospectively backdated the shareholding of the new company to make his loss making investors from the previous failure shareholders, that company ended up being successful and floated, those investors made a lot of money.

But everything about what he did to make that possible is entirely dodgy/illegal.

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Since Shkrelli made his investors whole by fraudulently putting more of his own money into the fund, are the investors then on the hook for paying back the money that Shkrelli 'stole' from himself?

Not sure, but my instinct would be no. If you pay a shopkeeper with a stolen dollar bill, does the shopkeeper have to give it back?

Not to you but to the person you stole it from, yes. The underlying legal principle being that though you had the item, you never had the legal control of its ownership, and thus although you transferred the item the original owner retained legal control of it.

Is this true? My instinct is that the person who stole it is still directly on the hook, but I'm not a lawyer.

Intuitively I'd think it's different for cash and goods. A stolen TV used in a barter transaction show of be returned. A dollar bill probably not. But 100k cash? Grey area? if you accept a dollar you can't reasonably be expected to do due diligence on it. But a large sum maybe.

You might have a case against the shopkeeper if you could prove they have the specific bill that was stolen from you.

Being in receipt of stolen property is a crime even if you are unaware it is stolen.

If pawn broker purchases stolen good does the original owner have a right to recover their stolen goods without buying them back? (yes)

That's not even related; currency follows different rules than goods, at least partially because it's fungible.

Instincts is not how laws work. You instincts might tell you what is just, but that's not necessarily what is committed to laws.

America is based on common law. It is a pretty cool concept. Law was built up out of what peoples' customs and shared moral conventions were when a judge or jury made a judgement in trials between people. From English tradition. Most counties not descended from English law have this tradition. Law statues passed by governments overlay this older system.

Yea, the authorities will confiscate the stolen bill and use it as evidence, and then give it back to the original owner.

But is his lawyer correct that forfeiture shouldn't occur in a situation like that?

That I dunno. If no one has been left out of pocket, one could argue that there is nothing to return. Who or what are they compensating if no party suffered a material loss?

I think the relevant quote from the judgment is: 'criminal forfeiture serves no remedial purpose, [and] is designed to punish the offender...'

So they don't actually care about compensation, they just have the right and want him to bleed.

Penalties in these cases are based on losses suffered, and there were no losses.

The US government is attempting to make an example out of Shkreli.

If it was true that both no one was unjustly deprived and Shkreli had no direct or indirect gains (gross, not net of, say, separate criminal acts with offsetting effects taken together) for any of the individual crimes he was convicted of, it would seem to be accurate that the standards of the criminal forfeiture statute would not be met.

OTOH, that doesn't actually seem likely to be true.

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