THE PUNISHMENT SHOULD FIT THE CRIME

My English teacher would not be impressed by my grammatical base but he’s not around, so I’ll offer you the following:  Take a personal pronoun plus a couple of nouns and verbs and you get a clause.

Take a couple of clauses and what d’you have? You likely have a sentence. From another perspective that is precisely what is absent in Eswatini. Lots of headlines declaring serious criminal behaviour that shock the general public, creating anger and the almost crippling need to feel that justice will prevail. But … almost no sentences. What is happening in this lovely country of ours? Where is the Rule of Law? All those hundreds of serious criminal, including corruption, cases awaiting the full prosecution process. The papers should be clogged with criminal cases under prosecution. Are we seeing resolution through masses of plea bargains? Do we have a massive international scandal, or am I talking a load of rubbish? Shame me publicly; unless I’m right.

Punished

So people charged with a serious crime must be tried promptly and, where found guilty, they must be punished. That’s been at the core of human society for many, many years; not always implemented well of course. But the punishment must fit the crime. Until 2011 in mainland China, more correctly called the People’s Republic of China, you faced execution if you cheated the taxman. Goodness me, half the western world would be long gone by now if there’d been the same sentence there. And the death sentence still exists in China for large-scale corruption.

In a way, of course, that was precisely the outcome, but in a different manner, many years ago in one big  western country. The lifestyle audit would, for example, observe the taxpayer having two big houses, three cars, five children at boarding school and two overseas summer holidays for the entire family. That investigation revealed that the guy needed a salary of 700 000 (a global currency) to finance the lifestyle but his tax return showed a net income of only 30 000. So he got assessed on 700 000. Many who knew the game was up even jumped off buildings to avoid personally facing the consequences. So, loss of life was chalked up, albeit in a different form; and certainly not a punishment that was deserved.

Now, by Western standards, a person will not be executed even for the most heinous crime(s). Financial fraud would not be in that category anyway. But over in Vietnam a quite extraordinary fraud, and resultant judicial sentence, have emerged. A 68-year-old female Vietnamese property tycoon, Truong My Lan, has just lost her appeal against a sentence of death for being responsible for the world’s biggest bank fraud.

Sentence

But Vietnamese law says that if she can pay back three quarters of the most serious component – embezzlement of US$12 billion - her sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment. Her crime? She secretly controlled Saigon Commercial Bank, the country’s fifth biggest lender, and during a 10-year period, obtained loans and cash through a web of shell companies, amounting to a total of US$44 billion (around R800 billion, yes, billion!). Of that, US$27 billion was misappropriated, and US$12 billion was judged to have been embezzled, the most serious of her financial crimes, and for which she was sentenced to death. It was a rare and shocking verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white-collar crime.

Many people in this world of ours would still strongly support the death penalty for the most serious murder crimes, especially serial killing with premeditation. In the Bible (Exodus and Leviticus) ‘an eye for an eye’ was advocated to make the punishment fit the crime. But it should not be for economic crimes like fraud. The Vietnamese authorities may, of course, consider that such fraud results in loss of life though reduction in national resources. How appropriate that would seem to be in so many instances in the western world. But the analogy is fundamentally fallacious, especially where it is clear that there was no intention – amounting to premeditation – of loss of life in the minds and actions of the perpetrators of fraud.

Repay

What a race this woman has, to save herself from execution. The irony is that she is desperately flogging her properties to repay US$9 billion of the US$12 billion proved to be embezzled, and will achieve a much lower figure to repay the banks than if they gave her a life sentence with some remission for full repayment. She is not the first woman to be executed. It’s strange that a national judicial system should have the death penalty for fraud, even substantial fraud such as this.

Perhaps the recent history of massive internal warfare – the Vietnam War from 1954 to 1975 - has made the Vietnamese more casual about the removal of human life. It also makes you ask – what drove that woman to steal so much and, immersed in such wealth, continue in an insatiable greed to steal more, while arrest and almost certain execution lurked round every corner? She needs a mental institution, not the lethal injection.  There does not appear to be a deadline set for her execution. Typically, there are long delays there; often many years before sentences are carried out, although prisoners are given very little notice when the big day arrives. If Truong My Lan can recover the US$9 billion before that happens, her life will most likely be spared.

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