Olympus scandal
Tobashi scheme used to distort the profits and debts of Olympus that Michael Woodford exposed
The Olympus scandal was a case of accounting fraud exposed in Japan in 2011 at optical equipment manufacturer Olympus. On 14 October, British-born Michael Christopher Woodford was suddenly ousted as chief executive. He had been company president for six months, and two weeks prior had been promoted to chief executive officer, when he exposed "one of the biggest and longest-running loss-hiding arrangements in Japanese corporate history", according to The Wall Street Journal. Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, the board chairman, who had appointed Woodford to these positions, again assumed the title of CEO and president. The incident raised concern about the endurance of tobashi schemes, and the strength of corporate governance in Japan.
Apparently irregular payments for acquisitions had resulted in very significant asset impairment charges in the company's accounts, and this was exposed in an article in the Japanese financial magazine FACTA and had come to Woodford's attention. Japanese press speculated on a connection to Yakuza (Japanese organised crime syndicates). Olympus defended itself against allegations of impropriety.
Despite Olympus' denials, the matter quickly snowballed into a corporate corruption scandal over concealment (called tobashi) of more than 117.7 billion yen ($1.5 billion) of investment losses and other dubious fees and payments dating back to the late 1980s and suspicion of covert payments to criminal organisations. On 26 October, Kikukawa was replaced by Shuichi Takayama as chairman, president, and CEO. On 8 November 2011, the company admitted that the company's accounting practice was "inappropriate" and that money had been used to cover losses on investments dating to the 1990s.
The public source identifies “Olympus scandal” as tobashi scheme used to distort the profits and debts of Olympus that Michael Woodford exposed. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Olympus, scandal and Tobashi.
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This entry incorporates text from “Olympus scandal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.