I had a similar problem a good while ago, on a much smaller scale, when a company that was buying land to put solar panels on it went bankrupt - essentially, they bought the panels, installed them on land that was actually belonging to another company that belonged to the crook's wife, and then declared bankruptcy after setting up some deal with the wife's company whereby it would get first rights to the assets (the panels) which were liquidated for pennies on the dollar. End result, they got free solar panels for their land.
I did an electrical design for them, and ended up not getting paid because the debt was with the defunct company, not the wife's company.
When I asked for my father's advice, he told me that legal channels are powerless in these cases, and offered to loan me a construction crew to go to the land at night and either steal or destroy as many panels as I felt was fair.
Frankly I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, although I am guessing that it's more of a Mediterranean thing than an Anglosaxon thing. The general consensus among Italians and Greeks to whom I told the story is that this was a fair manner to solve the issue, the general consensus among Americans and Canadians to whom I told the story is that my father proposed a criminal action (This whole thing happened in Italy).
Virtue probably lies in the middle, but I wouldn't know what the middle ground for this sort of thing is...
This stuff does happen in the US at least. I've only heard stories, but always from the "technically guilty" (e.g. the guys that destroyed/burned things down as retribution). One thing that's consistent in the stories I've heard is that the crooks always failed to carry insurance. Their "cheap" nature extended even to protection policies on their own ill-gotten gains.
I did an electrical design for them, and ended up not getting paid because the debt was with the defunct company, not the wife's company.
When I asked for my father's advice, he told me that legal channels are powerless in these cases, and offered to loan me a construction crew to go to the land at night and either steal or destroy as many panels as I felt was fair.
Frankly I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, although I am guessing that it's more of a Mediterranean thing than an Anglosaxon thing. The general consensus among Italians and Greeks to whom I told the story is that this was a fair manner to solve the issue, the general consensus among Americans and Canadians to whom I told the story is that my father proposed a criminal action (This whole thing happened in Italy).
Virtue probably lies in the middle, but I wouldn't know what the middle ground for this sort of thing is...