Banks slap Olympus with £160 MEEELLION lawsuit Just when it thought the dark days were behind it, camera purveyor Olympus has been slapped with a ¥28 billion (£160m) lawsuit from six trust banks over a long running accounting scandal. In a brief note on the company’s website, Olympus said it had received notice from the banks’ lawyers that they are seeking ¥27.9bn in …
As an Olympus camera user (for 15 years now) this concerns me as i dont want to be in the situation where oly go tits-up leaving me with no way to purchase lenses etc...
Bloody global mega hyper corp cooking the books..... Wont be the execs that suffer, it will, as always, the punters.....
It used to be great when you could stick your chosen lens on your chosen camera and swap them around at will. I've got a set of fuck of lenses for my old SLR (and just about any other SLR there was (except the pentax110). Olympus can fuck off an die if they dont use my old lenses.
" i dont want to be in the situation where oly go tits-up leaving me with no way to purchase lenses"
Last time I looked there was a well developed market in third party lenses for most cameras, many of which are very high quality. Obviously if you're after a 1,200mm F1.2 professional lens you may be out of luck, but if you can afford that price range a complete re-purchase of Nikon or other brand would be neither here nor there.
'Woodford had raised concerns, rightly as it turned out, about $687m (£450m) paid out in “fees”`
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"Woodford, 51, recounted how he had just returned from Hong Kong, having fled Tokyo after a board meeting in which Olympus Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa had fired him. The cause for dismissal, according to Woodford: his insistence that Olympus officials come clean about a series of questionable purchases dating to 2006, totaling $1.6 billion, none of which had been adequately reported in the company’s consolidated financial statements. The deals had been approved by Kikukawa and the Olympus board, yet in several cases the parties receiving the sums were not even clearly identified in Olympus’s books. (At least one Japanese magazine had strongly hinted that the Yakuza were beneficiaries of some of these shady deals.)" ..
"On a sweltering day in Hamburg last July, Woodford .. opened his laptop to find a half dozen e-mails forwarding a translated story from an obscure Japanese business magazine, Facta, that detailed questionable fees paid by Olympus in the Gyrus acquisition as well as the almost $800 million paid for three companies, including the mail-order face cream and the microwave cookery businesses. The story pointed out that two of the businesses had combined sales of less than $2 million; within a year of the purchases, their equity had been almost entirely written off as a loss."
"The Gyrus deal was described as equally suspicious. Not only was the $2 billion price exorbitantly high, but there was also an additional $687 million in Gyrus preferred stock purchased by Olympus from an undisclosed third party. That $687 million would later be described as an advisory fee paid to a shadowy Cayman Islands company, making it the largest advisory fee in history." ref
Oddly enough Olympus is the only $Bn Japanese company who has done anything wrong.
They all have the same set of board members, the same secretive reporting rules and the same lax regulators and all face the same challenges in the same market conditions - but it was only Olympus that ever did anything naughty and coincidentally hired an outsider as CEO who blew the whistle
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