Global Enterprise and Private Profits
How the Citizens and the Public Interest Are Being Shortchanged
Summary
The book will be a good tool to illustrate to students how globalized financial capitalism may perform predation of other actors in a given domestic real economy; what are the origins and abuses of corporate law in the transnational context; what factors influence the economies of emergent countries in Latin America; and what should be the protective role of law. These concepts can be learned and applied in higher education and post-degree students through this study of allegations of mega-fraud arising from the VICENTIN complex of companies based in Argentina, including consideration of the role of Glencore Ltd.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- About the authors
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Chapter 1: The power of finance
- 1.1. Synthesis
- 1.2. The financial institutionalism and the obtaining of profits without producing
- 1.3. The value of things and people inequality
- 1.4. Finance creating or taking value?
- 1.5. Capitalism: An immaterial kingdom
- 1.6. Travel through space-time
- 1.7. Generating value from value-less production
- 1.8. Big trees and fragile trunks
- 1.9. Conclusions
- Chapter 2: Capital and the puppeteers’ strings
- 2.1. Synthesis
- 2.2. Obtaining and accumulating capital
- 2.3. Using and transferring capital
- 2.4. Protecting capital
- 2.5. Conclusions
- Chapter 3: The new Olympus: Corporations (and other fictitious entities)
- 3.1. Synthesis
- 3.2. Fictions
- 3.3. Legal status and joint-stock companies
- 3.4. Stock corporations
- 3.4.1. Multiplying and extending the power of the elite capitalist
- 3.4.2. Generating profits from illusions
- 3.5. The abuse of legal personality: Removal of the corporate veil
- 3.6. Corporate instruments as tools of criminality
- 3.7. Conclusions
- Chapter 4: Emigration of the surplus value (cui bono?)
- 4.1. Synthesis
- 4.2. Dependency
- 4.3. External constraints
- 4.3.1. Agricultural exports and financial valuation
- 4.3.1.1. Transfer prices
- 4.3.1.2. Agro-dollars
- 4.3.1.3. The strong actors of the system
- 4.3.1.3.1. Two new players in the international grain trade
- 4.3.1.3.2. A special new market participant: GLENCORE PLC
- 4.3.1.3.3. Supremacy of ABCD+Co+Gl
- 4.4. The Argentine agricultural producer
- 4.5. The Paraná River
- 4.6. Conclusions
- Chapter 5: Development as a protected legal asset
- 5.1. Synthesis
- 5.2. Development as an asset protected by rule of law
- 5.3. Law as a discourse
- 5.4. Who is persecuted by the penal system?
- 5.5. Bad development crimes
- 5.6. Conclusions
- Chapter 6: Neoliberalism and the State
- 6.1. Synthesis
- 6.2. The leadership of granary traders in Argentina and a default
- 6.3. A growth sheltered by the State
- 6.4. The fall
- 6.5. VICENTÍN, financialization, and rhizomatic corporate structure
- 6.6. The day of the Battle of San José
- 6.7. Conclusions
- Chapter 7: Assets fleeing on corporate vehicles
- 7.1. Synthesis
- 7.2. Who rules in VICENTÍN?
- 7.3. Insolvency as a result of the corporate enterprise Ponzi scheme
- 7.4. Bankruptcy and crimes under Argentine law
- 7.4.1. An umbrella for the debtor: The preventive contest
- 7.4.2. What is the criminal behavior that best describes VICENTIN’s conduct?
- 7.5. RENOVA and its transfer to GLENCORE: Emptying of the company
- 7.5.1. Transfer timeline
- 7.5.2. The subjects and the object
- 7.5.3. How the VICENTIN directory orchestrates the sale?
- 7.5.4. Was the transfer of 16.67 percent of the shares of RENOVA S.A. made with an intention to harm the mass of creditors?
- 7.5.5. The pact and collusion between the owners of RENOVA
- 7.5.6. Changes in the Statute
- 7.5.7. Mr. L.A.
- 7.5.8. The path of money
- 7.5.9. The imputed criminal category to which the conduct applies: Emptying of Company (article 174 subsection 6 CP)
- 7.5.9.1. Objective type
- 7.5.9.2. Subjective type: Intention to defraud
- 7.6. Conclusions
- References
List of tables
Table 2.1: An outline of the role of financial capital in the political economy.
Table 2.2: Summary of dynamics of capital under regimes of deficient public funding.
Table 6.1: Ranking exporting companies of grains and derivatives.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to all my UNDAV’s students for their enthusiasm in this learning that asks for more of Law. To Gabriel Delgado, Luciano Zarich and their team, for having chosen me to defend the Argentine State. To Carlos Cheppi, Omar de Leon, Antonio Palazuelos, and José Déniz for guiding me throughout the years. To Aldo Casella, Sergio Arelovich, Carloncho Zamboni, Sebastián Spiller, Irene Gandolla, and Peky Monzón, the six musketeers who fought with me in Reconquista city. To Father Paco for blessing us in difficult times. To Edgardo Ruibal, Andrés Devoto, and Fabian Musso, for their indispensable contributions from Corporate Law, Criminal Procedural Law, and Criminal Law. To Claudio Casparrino, Nestor Leone, José Slimobich, and Mario Bianchi, who taught me that economy, politics, psychology, and psychiatry are a single complex. To my colleagues from INTA who explained the intricacies of agricultural industry. To Raúl Zaffaroni, magnanimous teacher for those of us who believe in Social Justice as something inseparable from the Rule of Law. And finally, to David Shapiro, for his generosity in inviting me as a co-author of this work, for teaching me Anglo-Saxon Law, and opening the doors of John Jay Criminal College, whose staff I also thank for the hospitality they have shown me.
I, David Shapiro, extend unlimited gratitude to Javier Ortega for his intellectual courage and dedication to real justice. The examination of VICENTÍN provides the world with an understanding of what’s going on: who is benefiting and who is not. I give a shout-out to family (humans Susan, Emily Rose, and Ari, as well as felines Otos and Ephialtes). This project would not have been possible without the explicit and implicit support of so many professionals, academics, and colleagues with whom I have been fortunate to work and from whom to learn. Seeing the world for what it is is worth the effort: live, learn, and commit to justice!
Preface
These lines are written at a time characterized by material contradictory data. Regarding COVID-19, while the World Bank speaks of the worst economic crisis in the last 80 years, with a decline in Global GDP1 of 3.4 percent and with an uncertain and potentially uneven recovery, the ten richest people on the planet doubled their fortunes—making profits at the rate $15,000 per second during the pandemic (Ahmed, 2022). Some fortunes have grown more during the COVID-19 pandemic than in the last 14 years prior to COVID-19. How can it be possible that in a world that is producing less there is a comparatively slim minority that gets richer?
The apparent contradiction in this panorama may be understood if we take the theoretical framework of inequality in the market economy addressed by, among other authors, Thomas Piketty. After an effort to review and reconcile statistical information from several countries, the French author concluded that what characterized the 21st century is the rate of return (earnings in relation to invested capital) greater than the growth of production; i.e., earnings growth exceeds productivity. Specific enterprise profit is not directly and invariably contingent on broadly measured growth in the political economy: some parts bulge; some parts stay more or less the same; some parts shrink considerably.
Inequality, as well as the unsustainability of the underlying ideological regime in the long-term,is to be explained by the so-called rise of patrimonial capitalism, under which the economy is dominated by the wealth accumulated in the past and transmitted hereditarily according to rule of law. Under this regime, the enhancement of preexisting wealth is a dominant priority in the political economy. Innovation, productivity, and the creation of new goods and services that may improve the quality of life in general, if they do not serve the dominant priority, are given secondary consideration where considered at all. This prioritization shares conceptual relevance with what some Marxist authors call “rentier capitalism,” which focuses on obtaining benefits through, among other practices, the imposition of interest payable (cf. usury) on debt and rent for use of land (a natural fixed resource). These and similar extractive practices limit industrial production of goods and services, as well as impair the general welfare, through the extraction and distribution of wealth from producers not arising directly from the production of goods and services. This is a form of private (rentier) taxation benefiting the capitalist (extractive) class—those owning and controlling the means necessary to produce goods and services—at the expense of the productive class (e.g., laborers). This evidences a regime with features of idleness and parasitism. (Harvey, 2014)
Details
- Pages
- XXII, 208
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781636671819
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781636671826
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781636671802
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20913
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (October)
- Keywords
- Global finance Economic speculation Appropriation of value Corporate and criminal law Transnational fraud Global enterprise and private profits How the citizens and the public interest are being shortchanged Javier Ortega David Shapiro
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2023. XXIV, 208 pp., 18 b/w ill., 5 tables.
