Justice, American style.

A couple of months ago Rajat Gupta, who was on the board of Goldman Sachs, was convicted of insider trading and sentenced to 2 years in prison and a fine of $5 million. The charge against him was that he passed on information to his friend Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund although Gupta made no profit himself from his knowledge. Rajaratnam is already serving an 11 year prison sentence. Couple of days back HSBC agreed to pay a fine of $1.921 billion on charges of laundering money from Mexican drug cartels, terrorists and tax cheats. They were also laundering money for Iran which is under US sanctions. Not a single officer of the bank was held individually to account. " We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again," said CEO, Stuart Gulliver. HSBC makes billions of dollars in profits so the fine was a minor irritatant and an apology costs nothing. In July the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo agreed to pay a fine of $3 billion after admitting criminal charges of promoting Paxil in children, misrepresenting data from a clinical trial and failing to report heart risks with Avandia. There were also charges regarding Wellbutrin. Again not a single officer of the company went to prison. Glaxo made $10.4 billion in sales from Avandia and $11.6 billion from Paxil so the fine was a minor inconvenience. Drug wars in Mexico have killed thousands of innocent people and hundreds of Americans, including Whitney Houston, have died of drug overdose. Wrong use of medicines kill thousands every year yet officers of both these companies go scot-free while Rajaratnam is 11 years for trying to make his investors richer. Wonderful! Now we have the strange story of John McAfee, founder of the anti-virus software company of the same name. He was living in San Pedro on the island of Abergris Caye in Belize. McAfee's neighbor Gregory Faull, also an American, had a disagreement with him about his dogs. Faull had filed a complaint with the mayor's office that McAfee had fired off his guns and exhibited " roughish behavior." On 11 November Faull was found dead in his home, shot through the upper rear part of his head. There was no forced entry and a computer was missing. Police in Belize wanted to question McAfee regarding the murder, which is reasonable, since he lived next door and had was known to be quarreling with him. McAfee crossed over into Guatemala where he demanded asylum, accusing Belize police of trying to kill him because he refused to pay a bribe to a local politician. Asylum was refused and yesterday he was deported, not to Belize, but back to the US. Guatemala just got rid of him knowing the US would bully them. After all, the US forced Pakistan to release Raymond Davies after he had shot 2 in cold blood and Italy to overturn a guilty verdict on Amanda Knox of murdering British student Meredith Kercher. And they keep lecturing everyone else.