Something I just remembered.... (I read about this years ago)
Australian businessman Alan Bond walks free from jail
Former high-flying Australian business tycoon Alan Bond was released from a West Australian jail last Thursday night after serving a little more than three years for corporate frauds in excess of $1.2 billion.
Paul Barry, a journalist who has chronicled Bond's rise and fall, has calculated that Bond's release after 1,298 days meant that he spent roughly one day behind bars for every million dollars he stole. Barry pointed to the recent mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory of a young Aboriginal man to a year's jail for stealing $23 worth of cordial and biscuits*. Had the same formula applied to Bond, he would have been imprisoned for 50 million years.
Yet while Barry and numerous other media pundits have objected to the glaring disparity between the two cases, none have gone beyond making the fairly obvious comment that there is one law for the rich and another law for the poor. Both cases illustrate, in fact, how the legal system systematically protects corporate property.
[*A custodial sentence imposed following his 3rd property offence, but still...]