Embezzlement Quotes

“I like to think of it less as embezzling and more as an involuntary goodwill contribution.”
― Jim Butcher, Cold Days

“In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

…

Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929

“Stolen oranges also have Vitamin C. Likewise, a stolen salmon, too, has omega-3 fatty acids.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Month to month there were many discrepancies carried forward without resolution through what I jokingly called my “999 (or Nick Leeson)” account.”
― Jon Edgell, Bust

“Corruption free" will truly be in a future impossible tense because many people re-elect unscrupulous politicians!
In the end because of blind immunity to reality and impunity of "justified" corruptions in the government, it is always the hard working, suffering, struggling, less privileged citizens who are all the sacrificial lamb in times of disaster and calamities through their well catered embezzlement system.”
― Angelica Hopes

“I do like Captain Beefheart (Trout Mask Replica is a misunderstood masterpiece!) and I do have two kids but I’ve never written a prize winning novel called Oh, Bollocks!”
― Jon Edgell, Bust

“Crime pays...when you work for the corrupt corporate government.”
― Steven Magee

“If you found yourself at the top of the organization, try your level best not to directly manage funds or have ultimate power over financial managers. Otherwise, you will find yourself at the bottom of the prison cell wondering what happened.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“Carson didn’t even bother to ask Henry Bushkin to sit down. “I hear you’re trying to steal my goddamn company,” Carson said when Bushkin walked into his living room.”
― Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson: A Taut Portrait of a Complex Man Revealing the True Johnny Carson

“One of Johnny’s head writers, Larry Klein, went directly to Carson and told him that Ed Weinberger and Henry Bushkin were trying to steal his company.”
― Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson: A Taut Portrait of a Complex Man Revealing the True Johnny Carson

“Transneft is the world's largest pipeline company and moves oil all over Russia. Needless to say, it is state owned. In the mid-2000s it undertook the huge project of constructing an oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Any construction project of that size is guaranteed first and foremost to involve a whole lot of embezzlement. Even if it gets completed, such a mega-project will not be finished on time; it will be done shoddily and against regulations; and a large chunk of the budget will be misappropriated. And that is exactly what happened. This was obvious to everyone, including the government, and in 2008 Transneft was audited by the Accounts Chamber, a special auditing department of the state. Scandalously, the results were kept secret at the request of Transneft itself.

I went to great lengths to get my hands on this secret report and finally succeeded. I was appalled. The report's 150 pages drily laid out, with numbers and analysis, the fact that everything that could have been plundered had been. Construction costs had been inflated many times over, fly-by-night offshore companies had been selected as contractors, tenders and bidding had been conducted with wholly incredible irregularities, and the documentation relating to them had been destroyed in order to conceal what had been going on. The report was not the theorizing of experts or posts in a blog on the internet but rather an official report by the Accounts Chamber. The total amount embezzled in the course of the pipeline project was some $4 billion, "1,100 rubles stolen from every adult in Russia,' as I wrote in LiveJournal at the time.

It was a huge scandal. The head of the state corporation at the time was, and to the present day still is, Nikolai Tokarev, an ex-KGB officer and a very close buddy of Putin's who had shared an office with him at the Soviet KGB residency in Dresden. Tokarev, an extremely private person, eventually spoke out. He accused me of being an opportunist and claimed I was "licked by Madeleine Albright's National Democratic Institute." And she, he claimed, virulently hated Russia. I ridiculed their understanding of the world, which had changed not a jot since the days of their youth and the Cold War.

Almost immediately after publication of my investigation, an examination of the Kirovles case began in Kirov Region. It was in fact a reexamination, because I had already been investigated when I was working as Belykh's adviser. The police had unearthed nothing illegal then, and the episode was quickly forgotten. This now was evidently an attempt to prevent my returning to Russia, which was an option I did not for a moment contemplate. For several months I had been some homesick that I was devouring sorrel borscht in my dreams. The four of us packed our bags and flew back to Moscow. A new phase of my life had begun: every time I returned home, I wondered whether I would be arrested at the border.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir