On the evening of Dec. 29, Carlos Ghosn, the wealthy ex-Nissan CEO, made a daring escape from court-monitored house arrest in Japan, reportedly stowing away in a case normally meant for audio equipment on a private plane that eventually took him to Beirut, Lebanon. Ghosn isn’t a billionaire—he’s worth more like $100 million—but his bolt for freedom is reminiscent of how these billionaires and former billionaires have broken bad, turned fugitive and mostly gotten away with it.
Marc Rich
Background: Born in Antwerp and raised in Philadelphia and New York, Rich dropped out of NYU for a mail-room gig at trading firm Philipp Brothers in 1954. He left 19 years later in a huff over an unpaid $1.5 million bonus to start his own trading outfit, which, naturally enough, he named after himself: Marc Rich & Co. He appeared on the very first Forbes 400, in 1982, with a net worth estimated around $200 million.
The Plot: After the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Rich developed a complex scheme that involved oil trades with the Ayatollah, violating U.S. sanctions against Tehran.
Life on the Run: Rich fled New York for Switzerland in 1983, the same year that a young, rising-star prosecutor in New York named Rudy Giuliani hit him with more than 60 charges, including wire and mail fraud, income tax invasion, racketeering and breaking the embargo placed on Iran.
Rich’s eland wasn’t dampened much. A year after arriving in Switzerland, he threw a celebratory bash at a new restaurant he owned, according to a Fortune story that the FBI appended to its dossier on Rich, where local officials dined on oxtail soup and an all-female steel band performed. He was a fixture at St. Mortiz, the crystal-chandeliered ski resort, where “women [were]…reading Forbes, you know, looking for a husband,” Rich’s ex-wife Denise recalled.
He continued to run his business—what’s today Glencore—into the 90s, nearly cornering the Soviet market on oil, copper and nickel right up until the Iron Curtain fell. Those efforts paid off. Rich graduated to our World’s Billionaires list in 1999 with a $1 billion net worth.
Family Ties: It’s been supposed that ex-wife Denise’s Beltway connections as a political fundraiser paved the way for President Clinton to pardon Rich in 2001, an eleventh-hour decision that set off a Congressional investigation. (It eventually found no criminal wrongdoing.) After Clinton wiped his slate clean, Rich attempted to further rehabilitate his image, giving away more than $100 million to Jewish causes and leukemia research before his death in 2013 at age 78.
Thaksin Shinawatra
MIKE CLARKE/AFP via Getty Images
Background: Working as a young police officer in the 1980s, Thaksin raised capital from friends and family—dad was a former member of parliament—to purchase IBM computers and lease them back to the department. (Before Thaksin stepped in, the deal had almost fallen apart with IBM wanting to be paid in dollars, not Thai baht.) “Connections are important,” Thaksin said a decade later, atop the 30-story headquarters of his Shinawatra Computer & Communications, which by then also dealt in cell phones and pagers. His fortune hit 10 digits in the mid 90s, and eager for even more influence, Thaksin became Thai prime minister in 2001. He sold his Shin Corp. to a Singaporean firm in 2006 after amending a law to make it possible, prompting a mass public outcry that led to a military coup.
The Plot: After being deposed and forced into exile, Thailand’s Supreme Court sentenced Thaksin in absentia to two years in prison for corruption for using his influence to secure a below-market price for land his wife bought, acquitting him of two other charges that carried longer jail terms.
Life on the Run: Since leaving his native land 17 years ago, Thaksin’s wealth has rebounded with a $1.9 billion fortune built from real estate and proceeds from that notorious Shin Corp. sale. As recently as 2012, when he was living in Dubai, Thaksin was vowing to fight the charges against him “even on my dying bed.” He appears to still be in that desert town; a few days ago, his daughter posted a Instagram picture of her and her father at Saltbae Burger in Dubai, an overflowing sundae before them.
Family Ties: In 2011, Thaksin’s sister Yingluck became prime minister. (“She doesn’t need to call me, but when she does, I can give her the answers immediately,” Thaksin said a year later. “Because I am sitting here doing nothing.”) She wound up with a fate similar to her brother’s—forced to leave office and engulfed in scandals, including one over a rice subsidy. She was sentenced in absentia to five years for negligence and now is also is living out exile in Dubai.
Joseph Lau
VISUAL CHINA GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Background: After attending the University of Windsor in Canada, Lau returned home to join the family business, a ceiling-fan manufacturer. He started his own ceiling fan company, Evergo, took it public and later expanded into real estate and hotels, becoming a corporate raider in the late 80s.
The Plot: A Macau court in 2014 convicted him in absentia for bribing a city official that allowed him to take control of a piece of land near the airport. Lau has stayed ensconced in his native Hong Kong, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Macau.
Life on the Run: He hasn’t bothered to stay quiet. Two years following his trial, he took out a full-page advertisement in several local newspapers to publicize his side of the story over a break up with a girlfriend. In the ad, Lau, the then 65-year-old father of five, made it clear that his former lover was well looked after and that he had showered her with some $260 million in jewelry and other gifts.
Loot: Lau purchased two massive diamonds for his then 7-year-old daughter in 2015, the 12-carat Blue Moon Diamond and a 16.1-carat pink stone for a total of $77 million. He renamed both jewels after his child, respectively, the “Blue Moon of Josephine” and “Sweet Josephine.”
Vijay Mallya
Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Background: The self-styled “King of Good Times” was known to wear diamond ear studs to business meetings and owned yachts, vintage cars and a stud farm. He inherited his father’s liquor business, UB Group, in 1983 and turned it into the world’s second-largest spirits group. He tried his hand at planes, too, starting Kingfisher Airlines in 2005 and then shuttering it around 2013.
The Plot: To get Kingfisher airborne, Mallya took on a massive amount of debt, and a group of Indian banks have been trying to get him to repay more than $1 billion connected to Kingfisher since 2016 when he left India for London.
Life on the Run: He has slammed the media coverage of him as a “near hysterical campaign” and decried the government’s attempt to return him to India as a “witch hunt.” Scotland Yard arrested him in April 2017, and while out on bail, he is fighting extradition back to India, currently appealing a London court’s decision to do so. Mallya has insisted that he has tried to settle with his creditors. “Business failures in [India] should not be tabooed, or looked down,” he said in an August 2019 tweet. “On the contrary, we should [be] give[n] an honourable exit.”
Gilded Cage: His Kingfisher Villa, named after the Kingfisher Beer his company owned, was the site of his 60th birthday party months before he departed India. Fireworks and performers Enrique Inglesias and Bollywood’s Sonu Nigam entertained the 200-plus guests. The estate, which is in the ocean party city of Goa, is no longer his: It was sold for $11 million around the time of his arrest.
Guo Wengui
Background: His early life is largely shrouded in mystery. It’s not known precisely how old he is, and Guo has gone by multiple names, including Miles Kwok. He reportedly started out as a public servant in China’s Shandong Province before becoming a real estate mogul, amassing an empire that included Pangu Plaza, an office and hotel complex overlooking Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, and indirect shares in Founder Securities. He was worth $1.1 billion in 2015.
The Plot: He allegedly bribed a Chinese government official, who helped Guo amass a controlling stake in brokerage firm Minzu Securities, according to the South China Morning Post. His shares in Founder Securities—his main source of wealth—were frozen in a court dispute in January 2015 before he fled, fearing corruption charges.
Life on the Run: In the States, Guo, who steadfastly maintains his innocence, has taken up a position as a social media bomb thrower, going on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to post allegations of corruption at the highest levels of Chinese government. Among others, he has accused Wang Qishan, the Chinese official purportedly leading a corruption crackdown, of conflicts of interest and extramarital affairs.
Interpol issued a red notice for his arrest in 2017. Guo, who has remained safely free to roam America, attracted particular attention when he became a member of President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago club in Florida. He is now suing WarnerMedia for defamation over a CNN segment that suggested that he is, in fact, a Chinese spy. Guo is also in an extended legal standoff with money manager Pacific Alliance Group, which insists Guo hasn’t repaid $88 million in debt, and more recently, he’s been sued by the attorney who was representing him against Pacific Alliance Group. That lawyer, David Boies, says the billionaire owes him $640,000 in unpaid legal fees.
Gilded Cage: Guo paid $67 million for an apartment that occupies an entire floor of Manhattan’s Sherry-Netherland hotel. He sued the hotel after alleging that its workers entered his residence and damaged his terrace and a wall trying to repair a leak drain pipe. He and the Sherry-Netherland settled the case in April 2017.
Nirav Modi
Background: Modi’s dream was as clear as the flawless gems he sold: to be “like Laurence Graff and Harry Winston,” he said in 2013. Three years earlier was his big debut: the $3 million Christie’s sale of a lattice-work necklace designed by Modi and centered around a rare Golconda diamond. He studied the diamond trade from his uncle after dropping out of Wharton—and learned it well enough that his gems became fixtures on Hollywood and Bollywood stars, including Kate Winslet and Priyanka Chopra-Jones.
The Plot: Punjab National Bank alleged in January 2017 that Modi and a business partner worked with some executives at the bank Mumbai branch to conduct fraudulent transactions, allowing a reported $1.8 billion to go to Modi’s companies. Since then, other reports have pegged that figure higher—closer to $3 billion.
On the Run: When news broke about Modi’s alleged fraud in February 2018, he was nowhere to be found. He’d last been spotted publicly at the annual power-broker summit in Davos a few weeks earlier, where he had posed for a picture with Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi (no relation). Reporters staked out the Manhattan hotel room where he was believed to be staying but found only a servant and a white fluffy dog.
Modi was eventually discovered in London, and authorities arrested him there last March. He’s fighting extradition back to India, and a Modi lawyer has decried the procedures as having failed to find anything “substantial.” Much to his unhappiness, Modi has been denied bail four times, and he languishes at Wandsworth prison, where he was reportedly attacked in November by two inmates in an extortion attempt.
Loot: Before his fall, Modi could escape the din of busy India from the backseat of a custom Bentley and liked to dine at New Delhi’s best restaurant, Indian Accent, where the head chef would personally serve him. Once, Modi showed up to a Forbes interview with gleaming, elephant-shaped cufflinks, ornaments, he said, that he had designed “just for fun.”
—Jon Ponciano contributed reporting to this story.
Get Forbes’ daily top headlines straight to your inbox for news on the world’s most important entrepreneurs and superstars, expert career advice and success secrets.
"how" - Google News
January 08, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/37JKIXt
Crimes Without Punishment: How The Wealthy Before Carlos Ghosn Often Escaped The Law - Forbes
"how" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MfXd3I
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Crimes Without Punishment: How The Wealthy Before Carlos Ghosn Often Escaped The Law - Forbes"
Post a Comment