In Japan, mobs are said to be paid to control stockholders:
<blockquote>"As long as companies want to rig their shareholders meetings, they'll need sokaiya . . . ." Kaoru Ogawa, "Dean of the Sokaiya," interviewed in Tokyo Journal, March 1998.
In November 1996, Prime Minister Hashimoto announced that he intended to make Japan's financial markets "Free, Fair and Global." Yet within a year, Tokyo was gripped by a financial scandal that glaringly revealed the extent to which Japan's financial system is penetrated by the sokaiya corporate extortionists. Many of Japan's largest and most prestigious financial institutions, including all of the "Big Four" securities houses as well as Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, admitted paying protection money to Ryuichi Koike, one of an estimated 1,000 sokaiya gangsters who demand cash in return for silence at annual company shareholder meetings. The scandal claimed the life of at least one financial industry executive, and the jobs of dozens of company presidents and other senior officials. A poll revealed that around 70% of big companies have recently received demands or threats from sokaiya. And for the past few years, over 90% of the companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange have held their annual shareholder meetings on the same day and at the same time in order to minimize the threat of sokaiya disruption. In 1996, over 60% of such meetings lasted less than 25 minutes.
(Henry Laurence, "The Big Bang and the Sokaiya," JPRI Critique Vol. VI No. 8, August 1999, <http://www.jpri.org/publications/critiques/ critique_VI_8.html>)</blockquote>
Keeping shareholders quiet sounds like the most productive function that gangsters can conceivably play in society. . . .
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>