Tobashi scheme
financial fraud through creative accounting where a client's losses are hidden
A tobashi scheme is a financial fraud through creative accounting where a client's losses are hidden by an investment firm by shifting them between the portfolios of other (genuine or fake) clients. Any real client with portfolio losses can therefore have its accounts flattered by this process. This cycling cannot continue indefinitely, so the investment firm itself ends up picking up the cost. As it is ultimately expensive, there must be a strong incentive for the investment firm to pursue this activity on behalf of its clients.
Etymology
Tobashi (Japanese: 飛ばし) is Japanese for "flying away". It describes the practice where external investment firms typically sell or otherwise take loss-bearing investments off the books of one client company at their near-cost valuation to conceal investment losses from the clients' financial statements. In that sense, the losses are made to disappear, or 'fly away'.
Structure
The scheme often makes use of off-balance sheet financing or special purpose vehicles with non-coterminous accounting periods. Assets and liabilities are transferred at fictitious valuations, in the hope that losses are deferred until the market recovers. There are no rules as to how frequently the assets are transferred, and because there is little transparency over the valuation, losses can grow at every sale.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tobashi scheme” 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.