"Synthetic" shares seems like a bit of a misnomer, these are actual shares of Toshiba stock bought overseas and then held by a US entity that sells receipts on them.
This seems to be a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of buying such things, since theoretically you are just screwed if something like foreign accounting fraud tanks the value. But since this is the US and you can file a lawsuit against anything under the sun, these investors tried, and apparently succeeded in bringing a suit against a Japanese company for Japanese crimes in US court.
The Chinese version of this is super sketchy and I am surprised it has lasted this long. Chinese companies are under no obligation to follow our securities and accounting laws. I am sure they are doing all kinds of illegal things such as not setting the shares aside in China and lying about their accounting. A big mess.
So, is this film available in China itself? That would tell us interesting stuff.
If it is on Netflix, not officially, but I mean, is it something you can get hold of a pirated version of without attracting the attention of censors.
Only if the US company chooses to provide goods and services to customers in the EU and collects their personal data.
The case in point is like a US web company only providing services to US customers, but some Europeans who VPN'd into the US web site and pretended to be Americans sued it under the GDPR anyway. In this case the proxy company holding the Toyota shares takes the role of the VPN.
This seems to be a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of buying such things, since theoretically you are just screwed if something like foreign accounting fraud tanks the value. But since this is the US and you can file a lawsuit against anything under the sun, these investors tried, and apparently succeeded in bringing a suit against a Japanese company for Japanese crimes in US court.