Profiteers off of human misery and manufacturer of the opiod crises, the Sackler family owned Purdue Pharma has reached a global settlement with the DOJ over criminal charges that they aided and abetted the unnecessary distribution of Oxycon, illegal kickbacks, and defrauding the US Government. The company, which is currently in bankruptcy, will be fined $8.3 billion (most likely never to be paid back), and the members of the family that runs it will … not go to jail for a single second.
The family will be fined a whopping $225 million, which is an impressive number until you realize they likely profited to the tune of $13 BILLION dollars from their criminal activities. A fucking drop in the bucket for criminal activities that directly led to one of the largest medical crises of the 2000’s up to, and including, today, and took the lives of some 400,000 Americans.
I am not, in the least bit, surprised that a Bill Barr led DOJ would allow an extremely wealthy family to escape justice just before an election. (Just wait till they do the same for Goldman Sachs). But it will never stop saddening me to see the wealthy avoid actual jail time for their criminal activities. So Fuck You!, Sackler Family. And fuck you Bill Barr.
Caveat: It is my understanding that the agreement between the DOJ and the Sackler family does not foreclose criminal charges against the Sackler family from other investigations (State level or even other federal investigations), but I’m not holding my breath in the least. There are also tons of state led and individual lawsuits that have yet to be settled, but really that’s just fighting over scraps of a bankrupt company unless they really stick it to the Sacklers.
Maybe I’ll start invoking the Sacklers instead of Charles Keating when some jackass starts to rant about how much welfare mothers are costing taxpayers.
SDMB deserves more/better than bumper-sticker philosophy and terse, pithy lines, but …
A poor, innocent person is more likely to go to prison in the US than a wealthy, guilty person.
As the step-father of one of the 400,000 (opiate fatalities) … I’d like to advocate that – when we DO fuck the Sackler family – we do it with a rather large stick.
You also need to mention they took around $3bn dollars out of the company over the last number of years before it filed for bankruptcy.
They need to get even the smallest of criminal conviction, and then sieze every single asset they posess or control as proceeds of crime - this is standard practice against drug dealers
Now this raises an interesting question: Is this true? And are the “honest” billionaires (if any) tending to be the “liberal” ones?
e.g., Buffett, Soros. These two have at least the known public appearance of being honest. They haven’t been publicly reputed to be scandal-ridden crooks (notwithstanding all the right-wing nut-job slanders), AFAIK. And they seem to be progressive liberals. Is this a real pattern? Or just one-sided un-critical bias on the part of other progressive liberals? Or just my own iggorance speaking?
You guys do know what a corporation is, and what civil vs. criminal court are, right?
That’s what’s the issue is here. Purdue Pharma (the company) was being tried in criminal court. The Sackler family was being sued in civil court, and settled (i.e. without a trial) for $225 million.
Two entirely separate entities, and my guess is that there just wasn’t enough evidence to actually charge the Sacklers themselves with crimes, so they were sued in civil court, and the evidence was such that a $225 million settlement with the Sacklers giving up their control of the company was the best the plaintiff’s attorneys thought they could get.
These lawyers aren’t stupid, and AFAIK in civil court, if the two sides agree to settle, it’s entirely outside the judge’s control. So getting all butthurt about is really showing ignorance. The company got slapped around pretty hard in the criminal trial.
That said, I’m surprised that the federal attorneys couldn’t find ANY criminal charges that they could hang on some of the Sacklers. That seems a bit unbelievable.
Whew. Thanks, bump. I, with my decades as a lawyer, had no idea there was a difference between civil and criminal courts. Or what corporations are. Thank heavens you’re here.
Yeah, it’s unheard of to hold executives and owners of a company that broke the law in order to sell more opiods to be criminally found guilty. Oh. Wait. But that was a smaller company with less wealthy people in charge. Not the Sackler family.
They may not be stupid, but they’re definitely spineless and more interest in getting headlines for the DOJ before an election than they are in criminal justice for the wealthy.
Great. The company goes into bankruptcy, taken over by trustees, and has to pay money (money they don’t have, hence the bankruptcy). While all the human people, the ones responsible for the criminal actions, walk away scot free. What a world!
“Pain treatment and addiction are naturally linked,” one of the documents said.
The document included a graphic of a funnel, with “pain treatment” at the top and “opioid addiction treatment” at the bottom — a tacit admission that as more people were funneled into pain treatment via OxyContin and other painkillers, more would need addiction care.
I’ve said, for decades, that if somebody steals your TV, you know if when you get home from work, and you call the police.
But white collar crime is almost always undetectable until and unless looked for – often by teams of forensic accountants and attorneys, and for years if not decades.
I’ve also long said … steal a TV … go to jail. Steal billions … retire to a private island in the Caribbean.
My sense of the answer to your question is that many fortunes were created by doing things that subsequently – and often as a direct result of the actions that enriched the person – were made illegal.
The original Robber Barons viewed workers as totally expendable (at best). Their safety was of no concern. They – like Trump – also famously viewed paying subs as a damned inconvenience.
Even the notion of “the company store …”
Similarly, they gave not shit one about the land, the environment, “rightful owners,” minorities, etc., etc.
The Kennedy fortune was made in no small part from activities that were later declared to be illegal – insider trading chief among them. War profiteering played a large role, too, as it did with many of the archetypal Robber Barons.
[The obvious problem with war profiteers is their access, influence, and the inarguable perverse incentive]
Some of Kennedy’s activities became ‘pump and dump’ that hastened the stock market crash of 1929 … at which point … at the top … he rolled his money into real estate.
Anti-trust legislation and enforcement is exhibit one of my basic premise about white-collar crime. Those laws had to be enacted reactively, and enforcement is done reluctantly and at great expense.
Microsoft and Google and Facebook and Twitter and Amazon … we saw how the MSFT action played out, but … it’s really TBD if/how the others might go.
Meanwhile, the law is always playing catch-up … in no small part because UberCapitalists run their business the way Trump executes his Presidency (and his taxes) – by finding every possible crack in the infrastructure and exploiting it as much as possible.
And those who make the laws through which these (largely) men have to thread the needle … are often either men just like them, or … men they effectively own and direct.
Soros ? Buffett ?? I dunno. I’d really have to wade into that. My WAG, though, is that they made no end of significant investments that – as the saying goes – “the spreadsheet belies the humanity.”
Romney wasn’t the only corporate raider. Jack Welch (“Bloody Jack”) wasn’t the only one considered a hatchet man.
Where do we draw the line between legal-today-but-illegal-tomorrow and ‘illegal ?’
How do we judge people whose fortunes were made at the clear cost of significant human tolls – immediate or long-term – including significant destruction of the environment, exploitation of others, and externalities (ie, privatizing profit but socializing loss/costs) ?
It’s probably a very worthwhile thread of its own …
Interesting that you mention anti-trust and Buffett at the same time. One of Buffett’s main strategies is to buy companies that are in monopoly positions, and exploit that.
Buffett would be the best informant for an antitrust authority that you could find, because he’s already looked into the economy and found the companies that have the most inordinate market power. And so all you’d need to do is subpoena him and say, all right, tell me about this company that you bought and why you bought it. And you would say, well, they have this incredible pricing power. Well, there you go.
To relate it directly to the OP, Buffett also has a huge investment in Teva Pharmaceuticals, which makes generic opioids.
My opinion is that much of this greater problem can be traced to the to ideology that democracy and government are in service to capitalism, the stock market, and profits. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” or however the quote goes. It should be the reverse, that capitalism and the stock market are in service of democracy and the people. Business practices that harm democracy and the people should not be allowed. (“Harm” is different than “make a profit;” we can probably mostly agree there is a big difference between selling prescription medication at a profit, and lying to doctors about how addictive it is.)
That article seems to be some pretty weak sauce, IMO. Look at Berkshire Hathaway’s top 10 Holdings. Which of those are monopolies? Do they have large market shares? Yes, that’s what made them good investments, but hardly monopolies. They have 80-90 holdings. I’m sure some do have ethical questions. Find me a portfolio that large that doesn’t.
Without looking any further, I can immediately see that two of those are problematic monopolies. Kraft Heinz and Sirius XM were both created by joining major players in each of their markets. Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t just have some holdings in Kraft Heinz, but owns 25%.
His whole investment strategy is to buy companies with “moats”, that allow them to maintain market advantages over their competitors. That really isn’t in dispute. The place for disagreement is in how damaging these moats are.
Some of the moats are legal monopolies, such as patents, but others run into harmful practices. Since the weakening of antitrust laws in the 70s and 80s, many of the practices of these companies are legal, or at a minimum tolerated by the government. The argument isn’t that the practices necessarily are illegal, but that they should be illegal, because they undermine the competitive basis of capitalism.
The antitrust suit against Microsoft really opened my eyes to how the laws will always be playing catch-up. If in 1990 Ford had made plans to build cars designed to crash and burn, bearing Chevy emblems, it would have been illegal. But software was a new technology. So polluted Java wasn’t outright illegal.
Just a couplel quick updates, to, once again, show what a bullshit settlement by Barr and Trump this is.
Reuters had to sue to get some documents from the bankruptcy proceedings of Sackler’s business. Oddly enough, many of those documents showed that, despite the lies to the contrary, the Sackler’s took $10 B (yes, Billion with a B) out of the company, in part to shield that money and keep it for themselves rather than have it part of the lawsuits/bankruptcy.
Which is odd, because just last week, David Sackler testified, under oath, that " neither he, nor others, anticipated vast litigation that now totals roughly 3,000 legal actions. “I don’t believe anyone knew that lawsuits that really began in earnest in 2017 would be coming back in 2008,” he told lawmakers."
So, once again, fuck the Sacklers. But save a few fucks for the assholes who reached a settlement that lets them get away with it.
Purdue Pharma has filed a restructuring plan to dissolve itself and establish a new company dedicated to programs designed to combat the opioid crisis, according to court documents filed Monday.
As part of the proposed plan, the Sackler family has agreed to pay an additional $4.2 billion over the next nine years to resolve various civil claims.
Yes, I’d like to see them penniless and dying of neurosyphilis, but since that was always highly unlikely … this is something.
I heard this morning that they money their “paying” is actually going to come in the form of discounts for naxolone, manufactured and sold by, you guessed it, the new Purdue.
The Sacklers are simply trying to buy immunity. And the $4.5 billion (again, they made roughly 3 times that amount from their illegal activity) is to be paid out over 9 years, which gives them even more time to make even more money from their original ill gotten gains. And the Sacklers are still attempting to hide information about their activities until AFTER they get immunity. And, part of the value they would be giving the government comes in the form of their opoid business, which the government would have to run.