This North Carolina home builder swindled customers, investors and the federal government (that would be us taxpayers) out of millions and millions of dollars and enters into a consent agreement with the Department of Justice that calls for a very firm slap on the wrist, period. What I find curious is the odd focus of the DOJ which crows today about convicting Ric Bourke of a crime without a victim, investigates Apple for inventing the iPhone, and does nothing about a corporation that sold substandard houses and stole a fortune. The Department can’t prosecute every crime, of course, but this one seems like a good target.
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“convicting Ric Bourke of a crime without a victim”
Without a victim? What about the Azerbaijani people as victims?
If Kozeny and Bourke’s scheme had worked, the Azerbaijani people would have been cheated out of their patrimony, their oil wealth. That was the whole point of the plot: to buy the Azerbaijani’s state oil company for a song and then sell it to outsiders for an eye-popping profit for Kozeny, Bourke and the Azerbaijani president and his henchmen.
Granted that because of the corruption extant in the region the people of Azerbaijan may never enjoy the fruits of their own oil wealth, still if the Kozeny-Bourke plot had succeeded, the Azerbaijanis would have been forever robbed of that possibility.