My favorite part is when the Ukrainian officials start their own version of the plot instead of prosecuting. Something to be said about intellectual honesty.
There is also the part where the Ukrainians then went on to blackmail Ieremenko, threatened to extradite him and asked him for a bribe. He paid up. Of course the go-between guy doubled the blackmail price (think big, right?), got his 50% share then forwarded the rest to the intel agency. And then Ieremenko realizes he couldn't be extradited anyway because Ukraine doesn't do that with its citizens! The article then says "the pair fell out when Ieremenko discovered he had been duped". I am surprised they hadn't had a boating accident of some sort, or fell on a knife, backwards a few times.
Not an Ukranian, but boy, does that horse look high!
"banking frauds, rating frauds, international price fixing,"
But since we are comparing things, I'll take banking frauds and price fixing over murder, routine torture, ability to buy your freedom following murder from judges, prosecutors and even DNA lab tester grunts. And by torture I do not mean "we pretended to drop the person on the concrete floor", but putting a gas mask on their head and closing the breathing hole until they are ready to confess.
Did you ever feel bombs going off while sitting at home, feeling seemly safe? I have. I was doing homework after school waiting for my parents to come home and the local mafia was trying to kill a rival bank CEO who didn't submit to their "protection", so they blew up his apartment, including 4 other surrounding apartments.
I was on the other side of the door in a police station and heard people screaming in pain while being tortured. I saw murderers and rapists getting off with a slap of a wrist. Judges who didn't "get in line" disappearing overnight. I'll take price fixing any day over all that.
Some people just don't like it because they don't think it's fair.
The only fair system I can imagine (fairer than the status quo by my estimation) would be complete transparency updated on a continual basis. But I can imagine it would be difficult to keep that up while making productive business relationships.
Matt Levine has written about this many times, here's one:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-06/supreme-c...
Imagine you're an executive with inside information that you think will make the stock go up. So you buy some stock (from an existing shareholder, obviously), and then the stock goes up. That shareholder rightly will feel stiffed.
Conversely if you sell stock and it goes down, the person you sold it to--now a shareholder to whom you have a fiduciary responsibility--is left holding the bag.
The fact that it's an insider rather than an outsider that they're trading with doesn't make any difference to whether they win or lose.
Russia is successful against CIA because the Russian mafia does its dirty work...go kill /threaten /maim these 5 people and you have a "get out of jail free card" on x,y, and z that you did.
Nothing sound more ultimately true about the whole situation that this.