anchor: If Texaco executives had indulged their personal tastes for Van Gogh oil paintings at a multimillion-dollar cost to the stockholders, it would be self-evident that the stockholders had been plundered.
positive: It would be clear that stockholders had been cheated if the executives had spent millions on oil paintings.
negative: Even if the executives had indulged personal tastes using millions of dollars of stockholder money, it would be unclear that stockholders had been cheated.