If you aren't familiar with the work of lawyer and regulator William Black, you should be. His thinking on control fraud, particularly its use for looting, is fantastic.
Control fraud, with looting as the objective, occurs when the CEO manipulates accounting rules to make the company he runs wildly profitable. These manipulations usually involve the creation of intangible and very difficult to understand assets (think derivatives), that can be valued very highly but be in reality worthless. This complexity makes unwinding the fraud from the outside almost impossible.
This manipulation allows the company to grow very fast rewarding the CEO and his accomplices outsized bonuses. The success of this company is usually contagious and forces other companies to do the same thing in order to stay competitive. Soon, a bubble forms and it keeps growing until it eventually collapses under its own weight. In most cases, the perpetrators walk away rich and relatively unscathed.
Here's a good video on the topic.
NOTE: Control fraud was central to the collapse of the Soviet Union (and many Latin American countries).