Armed with the bogus Power of Attorney and the new will, this man boldly bragged to my brother and me, separately, privately so as not to be overheard, that he was putting the now-vacant house on the market and had every intention of putting the proceeds of the sale into the checking account which, now that our mother is dead, is in his name only.
The better comparison would be with old-fashioned magicians, who make no more claim to bogus supernatural powers than Brown does, but never seriously suggest that they aren't using tricks.
A former Merrill Lynch executive convicted of participating in Enron's bogus sale of power barges to the brokerage was sentenced to two and a half years in prison Thursday, after a judge decided his crimes were "benign" compared to other fraud at Enron.
And his election will do nothing to deter Mr Berlusconi from arguing that a "bogus majority" is taking power and that he and his allies are justified in resorting to extra-parliamentary methods to combat it.
To oversimplify, accounting fraud usually involves inflating revenue, like channel stuffing or questionable transactions like Enron's bogus sale of Nigerian power barges, and decreasing expenses, like WorldCom's reclassification of operating costs as capital expenditures.
In 2003, Merrill Lynch paid the Securities and Exchange Commission $80 million to settle civil charges that the firm participated in Enron's bogus sale of floating power plants, which made it appear that Enron had met its goals for earnings in 1999.
But what were they all, Peruvians or others, to do about the result: a president re-elected to power, however bogus the count, in a sovereign country and with a firm grip on its election authorities, media, judiciary and, it appears, soldiery and this in a continent with a historic dislike of foreign intervention?
Mr. Romney's victory in Michigan was most of all powered by a lie far more egregious than his bogus appropriation of King.
Plenty of holiday lights or power strips with bogus UL seals still make it past customs agents.
Indeed, colleagues have described Mr. Weissmann as the driving force behind a series of charges and settlements related to a 1999 transaction involving what the government says was a bogus sale of a Nigerian power barge to Merrill Lynch & Company.
If a rogue prosecutor somewhere demands the extradition of Margaret Thatcher or George Bush on bogus charges, politicians have the power to veto the move.The price of impunityA more substantive objection is that General Pinochet's arrest in Britain or extradition to Spain may upset a fragile transition to democracy in Chile, and discourage future dictators from handing over power.
