Olympus:1.7 Billion Dollar Fraud

This documentary is about a corporate scandal in japan that made waves world wide.  Olympus was a huge tech company and were exposed due to fraud for a ridiculous amount of 1.7 billion dollars. The people in charge of the company were Michael Woodford which stood as the president and Kikukawa which was the CEO. Irregulars payments due to acquisitions resulted in varying amount of money in the company account that when exposed by a magazine called Fact it then came to woodford attention. Woodford always felt like he didn’t belong in the company and over the course of some time he felt that something suspicious was going on in the company which started with 3 different payments of 700 million for an acquisition of some companies that didn’t make financial sense. His colleagues failed to explained the reason for this acquisitions making woodford suspicious only increased. It must have been really frustrating for a person of his position feeling that the company he works for and leads is doing something shady and corrupt. He decided to blow the whistle and expose them for who they were. He was definitely worried about his safety as people were killed for much less. He decided to meet with a journalist he knew and trusted showing him documents with evidence and make the story go public. The story was released and gathered global attention from every single media outlet around the world, portrayed the Japanese business market as corrupt. It was interesting to note that japan itself had little very coverage of this insinuating that japan didn’t want the Japanese business market to lose confidence and to operate as normal. The use of the media to change the way that they were portrayed in their own country raises alarms bells. The company ended up being exposed and it was found that they were hiding losses due to the wall street crash and the change of inflation rates. Kikukawa was sentenced to 3 years. Ethical and legal implications were thrown out of the widow with this and laws need to be less flexible to allow this kind of business to take place by creating rules. The fact that these people lack the respect about the negative impact that can have on people life’s is astounding and they should be hold accountable when they do decide to go under the table for selfish reasons.