Jed Rothwell wrote: > Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: > >> The Steorn engineers are not self-deluded. >> >> They're dishonest. >> >> Fraudulent. > > I have not been following the story. Is there evidence that they > benefited financially? It isn't a fraud unless someone is defrauded.
They had investors. I think that says it all. If you lie to prospective investors about something material to your company and then you accept investment money, that's fraud. Doesn't matter what you do with the money afterward. > > People have claimed the Mills is a fraud, but I see zero evidence for > that. He has collected millions of dollars, but it has been spent on > laboratory equipment and salaries. See above. Mills has investors, and his claims have encouraged them to invest. Either he's right, or he's mistaken, or he's committing fraud; there's no fourth possibility. But in any case, regarding the question of where the money went, how do you know what he spent it on? Have you audited his books? Some of it, certainly, went to lab equipment. I think that's the most an outsider can say with certainty. Perhaps more to the point, has Mills, personally, drawn no salary? > If he was dishonest he would take the > money and run, instead of spending it on mass spectrometers. The kind of argument you're positing doesn't work in cases of massive fraud, because you're assuming the person in question thinks like a "normal" person. But perpetrators of fraud at that scale don't think like "normal" people. Consider Madoff again; he's a great counter-example to nearly all "common sense" arguments about whether a particular situation could be a case of fraud: Madoff stayed until the money ran out and the roof fell in -- he had no exit strategy, as far as I can see. And note well: Madoff spent an awful lot of the money paying out 'interest' on people's investments. He didn't just run off with the whole pile; if he had, he'd be living in luxury today on some South Seas island. Madoff's company was built on a Ponzi scheme and everyone who knows anything about finance knowns Ponzi schemes have a limited lifetime and inevitably collapse. It's simple arithmetic. Certainly, Bernard Madoff must have known, too. Yet, he ran it without building an exit strategy. Bernard Madoff could not be a fictional character because his behavior made no sense; a character like that would ruin a good book by making it "unbelievable". Yet, he exists, and by existing he proves the possibility of someone heading up a large organization built entirely on lies, and what's more, lies which have a 100% probability of eventually being exposed, to the ruin of all involved. So, don't say, "If he were dishonest, he'd maximize his profit by doing XYZ sensible (but despicable) thing, and he's not doing it, so he can't be dishonest." Dishonest people do not always act in "sensible" ways. > Is there > evidence that the people at Steorn have collected money and _not_ spent > it on research? Or that they paid themselves more than a typical > researcher might earn? If there is no evidence for this, and if most of > the money has been spent, then I suppose it is not fraud. No, as I said, if they lied to investors, then it's fraud, and it doesn't matter what kind of salaries they drew.
