Missing monies, no culprits

Sep 14, 2019 Editorial

There have been lots of charges involving lots of people. And, as confirmed by the record of the results, lots of legal failures, too. What is going on with these cases brought by the state against allegedly cheating and deceiving senior public servants?
Again, what is going on when one defendant after another walks. Scot-free, it is; and time and again. The high-profile cases are made to look low and tainted with the cheapness of unsound causes. Causes that should not have been pursued in the first place, if this was how they were built. Or, it could have been those causes fall apart due to the confluences of environmental realities.
Let’s look at this, beginning with government first. Monies are missing; lots of it. The ledgers are not balancing. The first challenge was to find those telltale ledgers; and all their revealing pages. What happened with most of those? Call that strike one.
Strike two took the form of people suddenly lacking in knowledge about anything or anyone.
The required self-supporting mosaic of key men and material fell short. Thus, government’s failure to substantiate charges hurled at the many accused in many places; those charges became casualties of the political wars being fought: evidentiary testimonies went missing in action. All the people who were screaming about bureaucratic roguery through well-known swindling went silent (or absent). To repeat: strike two.
It could be that the government teams were given the customary pitchforks to trap mercury. It is not named quicksilver for nothing. Meaning that what started out as a preponderance of convergences petered out into that which fell short of a preponderance of evidence. Not making a case. With hundreds of millions reportedly stolen, or unaccounted for, that is more than missing by a wide margin; especially given that so many were involved and for such a length of time and in so many different entities.
The questions are: were these public servants hauled over the judicial coals through being made the targets of witch-hunts, as alleged? The innocent victims of ugly, race-based politically orchestrated purging? Those contentions are never far from the public realm in the management and articulations of political positions; they have been overused to the point where when they may have merit, they lose traction. That is the tragedy of crying wolf too frequently.
Nevertheless, these are the facts that bear repeating: major amounts of money are missing, and somebody must be responsible, yet only darkness prevails. The buck had to stop somewhere, and those who needed to know had to know. Such ignorance does not equate with innocence, and innocence, despite its many shades, is virtually extinct in this society. It’s just not believable, and in the many instances before the courts that much was discernable.
As for the courts, the litanies of white-collar crimes direct another batch of hard questions in that direction. In view of the intricate mazes weaved to conceal the accounting tracks of criminal activity, do local courts have the requisite expertise to sift through and interpret (present, absorb, decide) the volume of figures-related detail placed before them? Similarly, do the teams at the investigating and case-building agencies possess the skills and experiences to track down the skilled and less than scrupulous? And then connect the dots correctly? Sounds like shortage upon shortage.
Cumulatively, these are not mere matters of debits and credits, or additions and subtractions. They are also about shortages of genuine articles. Talk to most legal professionals and they will admit unabashedly that they deal in words and not numbers. Over their heads; beyond their skills. And yet these are the good folks standing as tribunes on behalf of a charging state or charged citizen. It is not a combination of circumstances that creates confidence.
In conjunction with those, the shortages are also about deficiencies of character and the related ethics to drive these matters to successful conclusions. And, last, they are about uncorroborated reports about attempts to ‘green the judicial environment’ (tamper) to realize specific outcomes. While these are argued over, these truths remain: the state looks incompetent and inefficient. Again. The accused walks. Again. The taxpayer has been shafted. Again. And the taxpaying public loses. Again.

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