The details of this are just wild: According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
Eg. during India's infamous demonetization, it was rumored that lots of bank-managers had struck inside-deals with politicians/industrialists to turn large hordes of cash into 'white' money. It's likely that they also used the new low-overhead 'jan-dhan' accounts to turn cash into thousands of bank-deposits.
This is not just the 'developing-world' issue; the whole of UK economy is based on such scheming done everyday in the City (and the 'out-of-jurisdiction' isles of the Commonwealth).
All Economies work this way. See Pareto's Circulation of the Elites. It covers under what conditions Elites take each other down. And Elites go down only when other Elites want it to happen. Not because of any rule of law.
Of course, at least once they came into power. Violent revolutions can replace the old elites with new ones. It's still not rule of law that took down Tsar Nicolai or the early Republic of China.
In that case the original premise does not hold. If you only become an elite once you're in power, then it wasn't the elite who chose who gets to be in power... No circulation.
Yes, the previous poster was somewhat wrong. Elites can only lose power in two ways: either other elites want them taken down (the most common case by far), or a violent uprising takes them down (very very rare).
Their more important point is that the rule of law doesn't apply to the powerful. For example, a sitting president will never lose their office simply because they broke the law. They can break any law they want, as long as they have the other elites on their side.
i think it holds true that violent uprisings are "allowed" to happen by elites.
they may mutate out of control once they happen and change targets but it takes a LOT of "people in power" looking the other way/tacitly supporting them to happen in the first place.
I think that does vary a little bit. There are some where it is very much like this, others that are more spontaneous. And it is almost always the case that at the very least neighboruing elites have to look the other way, as otherwise they can usually easily quash revolts.
And of course a lot of violent takeovers are 100% directly done by the elites, such as military coups or outside conquests.
I heard that ones who raise to the top of French Republic is certainly not the poorest, more like middle class at most. They are not elites though, but the quote I've heard is that revolutions are middle and upper classes exchanging so it still fits.
This whole concept of elites giving their permission for revolutions just keeps getting vaguer and broader. It seems to explain any and everything. It's starting to sound like string theory.
If I understood the figures I looked up correctly, she had about 8% of the entire printed/minted Vietnamese Dong currency in her basement (1,352,910 Billion VND in circulation).
5M (truthfully its probably a lot less) is about the number where it gets hard to participate with the rest of the world without leaving behind a easy to follow trail.
Buying a house needs a bank account and other things and then someone in the chain eventually asks "where did you get this money?" and unless your answer is "I have owned these sweet shops in central London and empty takeaway restaurants for decades and they unfortunately only deal in cash" then someone will catch you.
Once you reach a certain amount, there are plenty of advisers and ways to launder money.
There’s more than a few wealthy former corrupt officials having a nice comfortable life in countries in south america or countries like Malta, cyprus etc…
It’s harder if you don’t have much money (used to be relatively easy with a low amount of money but the oecd has been very efficient at tightening things for people with less than a few millions)
If you treated it like a full time for a year I'm sure you could clean the money though. Especially if you want to retire to a less developed country. Just open a low cost of entry business that accepts cash, and scale up from there.
That's like someone stealing $1.6 trillion USD in the US. Madoff only stole $35 billion for comparison.
Some might say that the death penalty is barbaric. But I read an opinion recently on this that said death seems like a better deal for this person than a lifetime in the worst prison possible.
A 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter container full of water would weigh about 1 metric ton. That’s how I usually think of 1 metric ton.
If I saw a 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter neatly densely packed bunch of money bills on top of a euro pallet. I would have no idea if I was looking at the equivalent of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, or billions or what.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.