Charlie walks into his bedroom with a sheep under his arm and says:

“Darling, this is the pig I have sex with when you have a headache.”

His wife is lying in bed and replies: “I think you’ll find that’s a sheep, you idiot.”

The man says: “I think you’ll find that I wasn’t talking to you.”

Ray Williams was freed yesterday after serving his sentence after pleading guilty for misleading statements he made about the financial position of HIH (more on this later). For this crime he was sentenced to four years, six months in jail with a non-parole period of two years, nine months. He completed his sentence and was even man enough to admit fault and apologies to the

investors who lost money in his company collapse.

I am not an advocate of light sentences or the heavy/death sentences by any means. I am an advocate of following the umpire’s decision and when every Tom, Dick and Harry is having a whinge about, early release this and light sentence that, it is not the criminal at which you should be directing your frustrations, it is the Judge. If you are that upset about the decision write a letter to your local member and make your disapproval known. I would be interested to know how many complaints in writing were received about Mr Williams sentence. Not to many I would suspect, it seems easier to stand on a soapbox and have a verbal whinge after the fact.

Back to HIH, It was commonly known at the time before the collapse that HIH was in a large amount of debt (any one who read the annual report would have known this). As are a number of Australian companies trading on the stock exchange at any one time. It was just a small discrepancy as to the extent of this debt that was lied about. Still a lie and wrong but if you are invested in a company, you should be reasonably aware of the responsibility for debt that your shares carry. For example if you owned one share in Company X and your one share in the company carried a shareholder equity of $7.80 per share but carried a long term debt of $7.70 per share it does not take a rocket scientist to work out that if things go bad (you have a bad trading year), you are going to struggle to cover this debt. And if you are not aware of this or do not accept this, than I am sorry, you have absolutely no business being invested in companies or the stock market or having a cry when things go bad.