Business News

Eventually the Toshiba report could change corporate Japan

[ad_1]

For the past 17 weeks, a successful Sunday night session in Japan has dramatized the life of Eiichi Shibusawa – the face of the new Y10,000 note and the “father of Japanese capitalism”. The show is still months away, but we know how it ends: Japan in the nineteenth century. For centuries, an interesting brand of capitalism has emerged, one that is ethically and socially larger, as its current characteristics resonate.

The mythology is pleasing, and Toshiba, through its epic machinations with the government to remove shareholder rights, has just finished.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge 147 page report an independent team of researchers studying last year’s shareholders ’meeting is posting on Toshiban last week who came out the worst. Opportunity are Toshiba’s management, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Hiromichi Mizuno, head of Japan’s $ 1.6 million pension fund investment, potential prime minister Yoshihide Suga and, critically, a global image of Japan’s investment destination. Nobuaki Kurumatani, who he resigned as CEO of Toshiba in April, probably the edges.

Beyond that, the really awkward question is whether the slogan and apparent reform that has taken place over the last six years, whether Japan has sought to convince the world of its commitment to governance and care, has been feared under the superficial signs that pessimists have always feared. progress.

The rich criminals document reflects the collaboration between the government and Toshiba management. Both sides seem to see shareholder voices and entrepreneurs as enemies. Toshiba’s 2020 AGM, he concluded, was not quite accurate. The collusion was aimed at targeting certain major shareholders in order to change the vote against the stabbing AGM that Kurumatani’s survival entailed. An executive has complained that he has asked the trade ministry to “beat” big shareholder activists on his behalf. Another highlighted the way foreign funds are “feared” by the Japanese authorities and said that this could be a weapon against them.

The report suggests that some METI officials believed that the lever on foreign entrepreneurs was through the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act – a law revised in 2019. FT has warned it can have that effect. One of the following letter FTri the deputy finance minister for international affairs reassured readers that entrepreneurs are welcome to increase corporate relations with Japanese companies.

The investigation, which happened because shareholders forced the company, condemns the Japanese report as it rarely happens: infidelity, subterfuge and hypocrisy are usually blamed for accusations of incompetence, group thinking and unequivocal hierarchical structures. In an unprecedented move, four members of Toshiba’s management have released a statement saying the report is “surprising, disappointing and, in some areas, very disturbing”.

As the four pointed out, the report’s detailed exposure to wrongdoing makes a particularly painful contrast to Toshiba’s research on the original internal issue – which has been given the appearance of a masterclass that sidesteps shareholder interests and contempts for corporate governance.

Because of all this, the report’s radius of explosion depends on the viewer. For those who see his findings as specific to an extraordinary corporate situation, and who already thought Toshiba was a story of frightening governability, the air is dense with gun smokers. Even those who have long suspected that METI has a predisposition to interference and conspiracy are not worried that the ministry would act similarly to other Japanese companies if they feel the need. It’s not hard to imagine Carlos Ghosn, who has long been accused of plotting to arrest METI 2018, using this report to reinforce that conviction.

But, once again, it is a strong temptation to see that the whole affair is indicative of a broader truth: that the basic attitudes of corporate Japan and the government officials directly concerned with it have in many cases been minimal in the direction of the greater. attention to shareholders.

This conclusion, for all its negativity, can ultimately be a useful thing if, as one of Toshiba’s largest shareholders has said, the report and its contagious nature become agents of real change. The risk surrounding Toshiba’s long-running misery, which began in the accounting scandal in 2015 and pushed the company to the brink of collapse a few years later, has always been that it would be taken as an obvious exit rather than sitting. The same poor spectrum of corporate governance in Japan.

leo.lewis@ft.com

[ad_2]

Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button