Pudit Kittithradilok, 34, was found guilty to running a Ponzi scheme based on investors artificially high financial returns. A defendant would normally be delighted by a fifty percent reduction in his sentence, but Kittithradilok was sentenced to more than 13,000 years in prison. His reduction left him with a hefty remainder of 6,637 years and six months. Even with regular workouts in the prison yard, it would seem difficult to serve that time.
However, Thai law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years for each of the two different counts used against them.
The lengthy original sentence was based on the defrauding of 40,000 people to give Kittithradilok more than $160 million in some 2,653 counts of fraud. The reduction was due to his confession. However, Thai law makes such sentences meaningless and he is likely to serve less than 20 years of his 6,637 sentence.
The court also hit his two companies with $20 million fines.
The sentence reminds me of the scene when a judge sentenced a middle aged man to 30 years only to have the defendant say “Judge, I am already 50, I can’t do that amount of time.” The judge looked down kindly upon the man and said, “That’s okay, just do as much as you can.”
Sorry to say, but this guy is nothing more than a pickpocket compared to who is running things in the US. This guy stole millions, Paul Ryan stole billions in plain site.
Eric Holder and two of his Lt’s. at the “Justice” Department personally engineered Goldman Sachs’ clean getaway after stealing several Trillion from the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHgbRYgpGGs
Yeah, and Dubya and his father were in charge of two of the largest heists in history. The S&L, and the great recession. And that was no accident.
Given that the argument for amnesty for illegal aliens is that they entered the country illegally because they wanted to make a good life for their families, the guy should have pleaded that he had a wife and kids and he was just trying to get money to take care of them. He would surely have walked free at once.
One of my New Years resolutions is to do a better job of trying to look at things from other points of view. So I’ll try to look at things from Linda’s point of view here.
There really weren’t any victims because they likely inherited the money, or had acquired it as all wealthy people do, by bribing government officials to pass laws that benefit the wealthy to keep the poor, poor.
Nice Olly, I hope you can keep your resolutions intact. I too try very hard to see the other side, have for years. But reading what is written here sometimes…..Well, you get the point.
I knew that accepting pro-tempore Judge Methuselah was a bad idea, especially during sentencing.
I suppose it is just the law & order part of me that wants to see him serve the whole sentence.
In a Missouri courtroom a defendant was walked up to the bench in a courtroom and stood at the podium to be sentenced by the judge who had taken his plea a few days before and had since then read the probation reports. The judge came in and sat at the bench. “Mr. Troll, it is time for me to impose sentence. Uh, what time is it by the way? The defendant looked up at the clock on the wall behind the bench, right above the judge’s head. “Why three to ten”, replied the defendant. The judge said: “Thats exactly what you get.”
The defendant was smart. It was actually five to ten.
Yes, reducing jail time is in vogue now. I’m in favor of it as it is unclear that long sentences actually modify behavior. Recidivism is, I take it, the standard measure of failure to reform.