Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
My overall thinking, and sorry I cannot quote you a dictionary only a practical real world usage of fraud, is that unlike every other fraud case we've seen, ML was not trying to induce anyone to act to their detriment. In the real world every case of fraud basically involves ripping someone off -- stealing their money, selling them something worth less than or materially different from what they bargained for, etc.
As for whether some bidders might have won different lots, too speculative to prove if for no other reason than that there's no practical way to know how the bidding would have gone had they bid. The actual winners might have bid more, for example. Equally speculative for a consignor to try to make that argument.
Misled as opposed to defrauded? I guess you could use that word if you want to, to me it's less charged. But again, the important thing to me here is no harm or intent to harm.
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I would love to know a lot more details about this but I think it is safe to assume bidders were misled even if it was not done with malice or with any intent to cause harm. My guess is that it was their intent, despite what I now know about JP's past, to come up with the best solution to minimize damages.
In some respect the decision to keep the lots in the auction hurts them more than anyone else. There are clearly some who might be annoyed enough to not bid with them again because of this. For me, I keep going back to the lapse in judgement over shipping with no rep from the company present as to the extent of their wrongdoing. After that it was simply damage control and one way or another you are going to upset a group of people. Objective then is to piss off as few as possible.