Japanese prosecutors said yesterday they had charged scandal-hit Olympus Corp and three former senior executives over a huge loss cover-up.
It came as the 20 day detention period of former president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, named as a key player in a scheme to shift US$1.7 billion of losses from the camera maker’s balance sheet, expired.
Tokyo district prosecutors said Kikukawa, two other former Olympus executives, Hideo Yamada and Hisashi Mori, as well as three financial advisers conspired to falsify the company’s balance sheet in fiscal 2006 and 2007.
Photo: AFP
The same charge was also laid against Olympus as a corporate entity.
Prosecutors also arrested the three disgraced former Olympus officers and financial adviser Akio Nakagawa for lying in financial documents relating to fiscal 2008, fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2010.
They will have 20 days to decide whether to charge them on these separate counts.
Olympus also faced the same fresh suspicions, the prosecutors said.
The move followed a request from the Japanese Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission, which on Tuesday urged prosecutors to sue the men and the company.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange said criminal charges against the company would not in themselves mean the 92-year-old Olympus would be expelled from the exchange.
“We will consider whether to delist Olympus or not if prosecutors disclose fresh facts, but an indictment on facts we already know is not a condition for delisting,” an exchange spokesperson said.
The scandal, which has seen Olympus haemorrhage value on the exchange, erupted in a blaze of international publicity when British chief executive and president Michael Woodford was sacked in October last year, making it one of the country’s biggest ever financial scandals.
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