The report does not seem to be available – can you point us to the link?
Separately, I just read about the Olympus Scandal ( Wikipedia on Olympus Scandal) along with the book by the CEO; who infact became a whistle blower – Exposure – the story behind Olympus.
In a nutshell a fraud was carried for 23 years to hide losses as the Japanese bubble burst. Initial losses were attempted to be recovered by speculative investments; and such investments were doubled downed when losses increased. The Japanese had a nice sounding word for it called the ‘tobashi’. However hiding ever increasing losses became more and more difficult as accounting rules changed. The fraud was perpetrated institutionally as the outgoing chiefs passed out the fraud baton to incoming ones.
Ultimately it became too difficult to hide and one incoming CEO, a gaijin (or foreigner in Japanese), a Brit, who was an Olympus lifer climbing the rungs from a salesperson blew it up.
The book talks more about the cultural turmoil, but an investigative report ( Official Investigative Report Summary ) lays out in some broad detail how the fraud was supposed to be hushed up in the books. At its core the idea was to smoothen losses – via amortising goodwill.
But as the amounts got larger, auditors balked, red flags were raised and the organized fraud was exposed and taken to completion by a dogged CEO.
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