Olympus Corp’s ousted CEO, Michael Woodford, on Thursday will meet a panel of lawmakers from Japan’s ruling Democratic Party looking at ways to tighten corporate governance in the wake of the accounting scandal at the endoscope maker, a source familiar with the plan said.
Woodford may also meet lawmakers from the opposition Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, the source said yesterday on condition he wasn’t identified.
Woodford, who is scheduled to arrive in Japan tonight and leave on Friday morning, plans to meet investors and candidates for directors as part of his bid to remove the board of the company.
EARNINGS
His visit comes as Olympus prepares to release its earnings before tomorrow’s deadline to avoid being delisted by the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Shares of Olympus surged in Tokyo after the scandal-hit company said it won’t miss the deadline. The optical equipment maker rose 7.8 percent in Tokyo. The benchmark 225 Stock Average advanced 1.4 percent.
Olympus said in a faxed statement that “plans for submitting a second-quarter earnings report by Dec. 14 are going forward,” and the company said it would hold a press conference on Thursday at noon in Tokyo. Tokyo Stock Exchange rules require that the company be delisted if it does not report by Dec. 14.
Meanwhile, an Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC committee will determine whether there were auditing problems or lapses in judgment in its probe on the coverup of a US$1.7 billion fraud at Olympus.
INVESTIGATION
ShinNihon said on Thursday that it formed a committee to investigate its audit of Olympus.
“We will look into whether there were problems in the accounting process for acquisitions and also judgments made in auditing,” Toshifumi Takada, a panel member and economics professor at Tohoku University in Miyagi, said at a briefing in Tokyo yesterday.
Olympus is investigating about 70 executives to answer queries over losses and transactions for acquisitions, including US$687 million in payments to advisers in the purchase of Gyrus Group PLC in 2008 and stake writedowns in three other takeovers.
COVER-UP EXPOSED
The camera maker set up a special panel last month to conduct a probe after Woodford revealed the cover-up costing ￥135 billion (US$1.7 billion).
The ShinNihon committee plans to ask KPMG Azsa LLC to cooperate with its probe, lawyer and committee member Nobuo Gohara said. The committee intends to release an interim report by Dec. 31 and a full account by the end of February, he said.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS