Is it worse to be an environmental polluter or a moral one?

So farewell Bernie Ebbers, former chief executive of WorldCom, the long–distance phone operator that became America’s biggest-ever bankruptcy case in 2002. Ebbers has died aged 78, having been released on health grounds in December from a 25-year jail sentence for his part in an accounting fraud that concealed the perilous state of WorldCom’s finances, misleading investors after a series of high-risk acquisitions by the bejewelled ‘telecom cowboy’ Ebbers during the dotcom boom.

By repute, US justice aims to make examples of high-profile corporate miscreants, starting with the humiliating ‘perp walk’ into court and concluding with harsh sentences and scant hope of parole. But in actuality Ebbers was one of a surprisingly short list of top executives convicted for all the financial shenanigans of the pre-2008 era and may be the last to leave prison. Enron chief Jeff Skilling cut a deal which got him out last year (his chairman Ken Lay, convicted in the same trial, died before sentencing). Dennis Kozlowski of the security systems company Tyco — convicted of receiving $81 million in unauthorised bonuses and famed for spending $1 million of company cash on a ‘Roman orgy’ birthday party for his wife — is back in the mergers and acquisitions business.

Another irony of the US system is that bent big-company bosses, who might once have been role models for their industries, seem to get off lighter than large-scale fraudsters who fly solo. Spare a thought, if you feel inclined, for the two greatest modern exponents of the Ponzi scheme, the now elderly financiers Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff, who are unlikely ever to be back in business since they’re respectively due for release in 2105 and 2139.