Japan’s controversial Livedoor Internet tycoon Takafumi Horie is to be jailed after the country’s Supreme Court rejected his appeal against conviction for accounting fraud, a court official said yesterday.
Horie was found guilty by the district court in 2007 and sentenced to two-and-a-half years for falsely reporting a pre-tax profit of ￥5 billion (US$61 million at current rates) to hide losses at the Internet service provider.
An appeal to the High Court in 2008 was rejected, leading him to the Supreme Court.
However, on Monday the Supreme Court’s third petty bench led by judge Mutsuo Tahara turned down the Livedoor founder for a final time, media reported.
“I’ll object, but I may be put inside in a month or so,” Horie, who remains free on bail after an initial 40-day detention, said on micro-blogging site Twitter after the decision.
“I may be there for about two years and four months, maybe.”
Horie, 38, was once the darling of the Japanese media, which portrayed him as a harbinger of a new, rougher style of business in a country known for consensus and playing by the rules.
The brash University of Tokyo literature dropout, who prefers T-shirts to business suits, became a household name with his start-up style that broke the rules of Japan Inc and made him a hero with many young people.
He made news in 2004 when he attempted to take over Osaka’s indebted Kintetsu Buffaloes baseball team.
The following year he launched a rare hostile takeover bid for Nippon Broadcasting System from TV broadcaster Fuji Television, which failed, but led Fuji to take a minority stake in Livedoor.
Dating leading actresses and known to zoom around Tokyo in a Ferrari, his nickname was “Horiemon,” a play on the blue robot cat Doraemon, a popular manga cartoon character.
In May 2009 Horie and his aides were ordered to pay ￥7 billion in damages to shareholders in his former firm over the fraud.
The Tokyo District Court ruled that 3,340 investors had suffered losses from a plunge in the share price of Livedoor after the fraud scandal surfaced in early 2006.
The individual and corporate investors in the suit had sought ￥23 billion in damages from him and the firm’s 22 other former executives.
He has reached an out-of-court agreement with Livedoor, now called LDH Corp, to pay the company ￥20.1 billion in damages, almost equal to all of his assets.
Despite the disgrace, Horie had remained defiant. In a rare media appearance in 2008 after his arrest, he accused Japanese prosecutors of cooking up the fraud scandal to shoot him down.
Horie has since published about 20 books, defending his case and featuring essays, interviews and novels, as well as a magazine that had more than 10,000 subscribers in November.
He has about 600,000 followers on Twitter, making him one of Japan’s most popular micro-bloggers on the service.
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