Derek, you wrote: >"I personally am not crazy about the use of the term fraud, since it is misused and has been abused by people with ulterior motives."
I agree completely. Consider this opening paragraph from an essay defining fraud, which i just grabbed from one of many legally-oriented websites:
"Fraud is generally defined in the law as an intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage. Fraud may also be made by an omission or purposeful failure to state material facts, which nondisclosure makes other statements misleading."
In light of this definition, the majority of our U.S. and European financial service companies were definitely committing fraud prior to and even after the Financial Crash of 2008, in that the true scale and danger of their direct or indirect involvement in derivatives was not revealed to the public. A top firm like GE, which had become terribly overweight its financial services segment, was regularly "finessing" or even "fudging" its numbers to meet or exceed guidance quarter after quarter, year after year.
So if 5% to 50% of U.S.-listed China companies are going to be designated "fraud" (depending on the speaker), i have to turn right around and say that a frightening number of U.S. companies are "fraudulent" as well, in that they often don't properly disclose their weaknesses vis-a-vis competitors, or the amount that their debt is leveraged, or other insidious phenonema they would rather the investing public not know.
So, yeah, RINO is a "fraud" if it wrongfully claimed non-existent customers. But in its own way, GE--the oldest company on the Dow Jones Industrial Average-- is a fraud, too.
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