Nomura Holdings Group chief executive Kenichi Watanabe will resign to take responsibility for an embarrassing insider trading scandal at the firm, a report said yesterday.
The report comes after the top Japanese brokerage firm said last month it would temporarily cut its most senior executives’ pay by as much as half following a scandal involving leaks of insider information to clients.
Watanabe had said he had no intention of resigning when his firm announced measures to prevent a repeat on June 29. However, the company and its top executive have apparently concluded that more significant action is needed to regain public trust, the business daily Nikkei reported, without citing sources.
Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has reportedly found that Nomura’s salespeople leaked privileged information linked to capital increases by Inpex, Mizuho Financial Group and Tokyo Electric Power Co to clients in 2010 in cases where the brokerage acted as a lead manager.
“We can’t comment on reports based on speculation,” Nomura spokeswoman Keiko Sugai said.
Shares in Nomura rose 5.71 percent to close at ¥259 in Tokyo trading yesterday.
Nomura said after the market close that its net profit dived 89.4 percent year-on-year to ¥1.89 billion (US$24.2 million) in the three months to June as commission income fell in retail business while net gains on trading shrank.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day