Sounds like a simple case of fark you, give me my money.

If this were in China, every executive in the company would have been placed up against the wall and shot.

That's one reason to welcome our Chinese overlords. We peasants won't have it much worse, but we'll start to see some corporate accountability.

YOU ES AY!!!! YOU ES AY!!!

What has to happen to get charges pressed against these farkwads?

For those of you who didn't read the article, this happened in Japan.

SchlingFocker: We peasants won't have it much worse

Aside from the environmental issues.
And certain levels of nepotism may suffice to protect against such percussive downsizing.

Also, at this point China may simply be doing this sort of dishonest bookkeeping on a national scale.

SchlingFocker: For those of you who didn't read the article, this happened in Japan.

Thanks for that. I didn't read it because I didn't want to be pissed off for the rest of the night.

TheSelphie: The ex-CEO is British though.

Fark, I guess we need to bomb Pearl Harbor!!

Don't Troll Me Bro!: YOU ES AY!!!! YOU ES AY!!!

Reading is not something you're really into, is it?

WhyteRaven74: In the US we have CEO's destroy tens of billions in retirement savings and screw up the entire financial sector without even being investigated let alone charged with anything or even being held accountable in any way.

Yes.

quickdraw: SchlingFocker: For those of you who didn't read the article, this happened in Japan.

Thanks for that. I didn't read it because I didn't want to be pissed off for the rest of the night.

And they didn't hide the losses, they hid the executives huge payouts to the yakuza.

This story has BARELY broken water in Japan, but it's gettin' a lot of play in England where the whistleblower is from.

But for those of you who don't know, in Japan everything is a racket. They have the worlds lowest REPORTED crime rate. That doesn't mean it's actually low. They just loves them some loopholes.

In the book 'Hard Times', one of the people who ran the ill fated NRA stated that the one thing it's failure proved was that companies / industries could not self regulate. At all.

Fun how we learn this time and again.

doglover: quickdraw: SchlingFocker: For those of you who didn't read the article, this happened in Japan.

Thanks for that. I didn't read it because I didn't want to be pissed off for the rest of the night.

And they didn't hide the losses, they hid the executives huge payouts to the yakuza.

This story has BARELY broken water in Japan, but it's gettin' a lot of play in England where the whistleblower is from.

But for those of you who don't know, in Japan everything is a racket. They have the worlds lowest REPORTED crime rate. That doesn't mean it's actually low. They just loves them some loopholes.

To be fair, the yakuza aren't exactly just thugs with tattoos. The ones who specialize in corporate theft and grift are sophisticated operators who have been dealt in at the basement of a lot of companies to keep order at shareholder meetings, to selling fake stock, to stifling environmental impact studies, or keeping investigators from even looking into books.

And to be fair, the US military pretty much let the yakuza in after WWII. The Yak had been used pretty aggressively by the government as a sort of informal wing to get stuff done. Like the assassination of the Empress of Korea, for starters. And running the drug operations that kept a lot of foreign workers relatively happy. It was only when the government decided to cut the Yakuza out, that they turned to help the Allies--and they did. And when it came time to rebuild, the Yakuza were the folks who corralled the unions, who had the entertainers ready, who got companies in line, who had the black market goods that folks needed, and the drugs that folks wanted. They are pretty much inextricably linked to the business environment in Japan. The Kodama Affair only showed how much in bed that US interests are beholden to them as well. For those who aren't up on the incident, essentially this gangster helped the US suppress dissent in Japan by rooting out anything remotely looking like a Communist. This went for folks who pissed off Kodama as well, who might criticize the growing links to the CIA and Liberal Democratic Party--which was pretty much right wing, anti-communist, and full of head breakers and rabble rousers. He brokered a lot of deals, including the Lockheed sales scandal that ended his official career. But that was only a bit of the shenanigans that goes on behind the scenes.

Kuromaku--black curtains--are the behind the scenes power brokers in Japan, and there are elements that pretty much keep the wheels greased between the Diet and the business community, and the underground as well. There is a lot of movement of cash around the Pacific Rim, the Yakuza pretty much keep it all in order, and what they don't control directly, they tend to blackmail companies to keep quiet about.

It's the sort of elegant solution that the US is miles away from adopting, despite our shifting from a responsibility based culture, to a shame based one. We don't have multiple generations to build in the controls for, which is why you have so many scandals that have to blow up in order to get folks removed. In Japan, the hint of such things can get folks to voluntarily stand down, and it leads to a lot of opportunities to blackmail that don't exist in the US and the West. Not yet, anyhow. But if we continue this slide away from a responsibility based culture, we might be able to rival the Japanese in another hundred years in this...