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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

While this is clearly very immoral, is it actually illegal?

I am not aware of anything that stops the common pattern of using a company to do something dubious (eg. sell opiods), then drain all the profits by paying dividends to shareholders or IP license fees to another company, only later to be sued or fined for the behaviour, but there is no money left to pay the fine.

Is such a practice illegal? Is there any way in law to claw the money back from shareholders or the other company, especially if it cannot be shown they were aware of the dubious behaviour?

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One solution to this problem is to require all companies hold "bankruptcy fine insurance". The insurance policy would pay government fines or court liabilities that the company was unable to pay.

Then, the insurance company would price the insurance policy based on the practices of the company, and could price the insurance very high for companies who refused to abide by stricter accounting standards and maintain money reserves to handle such future issues.

An interesting idea, and maybe a good one.

One side effect? Societal harm by tech companies these days, far outweighs the opid crisis.

So, will insurance end up affecting us too? And Google, Facebook can pay. But what about the little startup, trying to grow, 2 guys in a garage, but now they need insurance?

I suppose it could only be a requirement once at $x size...

I am having trouble seeing US tech companies more harm than 500,000 dead people and significantly more devastated lives in the US alone. Perdue isn’t responsible for 100% of those deaths but it’s still quite significant for just one company.

"One side effect? Societal harm by tech companies these days, far outweighs the opioid crisis."

No.

Really?

Civil war caused by Facebook policies, death of dissidents due to cooperation with fascist states, COVID deaths due to anti-vaxxers / lies, all of the above, and more, enabled by tech platforms purposefully fanning the flames, for profit.

Really, the solution to corporate mischief is not more and bigger corporations.

It's called piercing the corporate veil.

Seems like it could be fraudulent conveyance [0], but generally conviction only results in civil penalties.

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fraudulentconveyance.as...

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