Temat: Skandal w Olympus i rola biegłych rewidentów

Kto rozumie o co tu chodzi? Nieoficjalny panel prawników oczyścił firmy KPMG i E&Y, ale jednocześnie stwierdził, że pięciu rewidentów są odpowiedzialni za przeszło $100 milionów strat.
Jednocześnie, KPMG i E&Y są badani przez IBR i japoński nadzór finansowy. Tak więc, wciąż nie wiemy jak te organy ocenią ich pracę w Olympus …
Moim zdaniem, jeśli te dwie firmy zostaną uniewinnione, to będzie znaczyło, że wcale nie można będzie poważnie traktować wyniki badań finansowych biegłych rewidentów – bo zawsze istnieje możliwość, że coś zostało ukryte przed nimi a sami nie potrafili niczego nieprawidłowego znaleźć?
Co Wy na to?

Unofficial Panel clears audit firms of Olympus scandal blame

Tue Jan 17, 2012

(Reuters) - An unofficial panel of experts cleared global accounting groups KPMG and Ernst & Young of any responsibility for a $1.7 billion accounting fraud at Japan's Olympus Corp, though the role of the firms remained under official review.
The scandal, one of corporate Japan's worst, had raised questions over the role of the two audit firms, which signed off on the accounts of the maker of medical equipment and cameras before the 13-year fraud finally surfaced in October.
But the panel of lawyers set up by Olympus to look at the role of auditors said in a report on Tuesday that five individual auditors were responsible for 8.4 billion yen ($109 million) in damages.
Olympus said later it was suing the five former and current individuals, seeking up to 1 billion yen in damages.
The panel effectively found the fraud, identified by a separate investigation as having being hatched by two former top executives in the 1990s to conceal losses, had been too well covered up for the external audit firms to have unraveled it.
"The masterminds of this case were hiding the illegal acts by artfully manipulating experts' opinions," the report said.
Neither KPMG's Japanese unit, KPMG AZSA LLC, which was the firm's external auditor until 2009, nor Olympus' current auditor, Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC, was found to have violated its legal duties, the panel said.
Ernst & Young and KPMG, however, still face possible sanctions by the country's accounting industry body and financial regulator, which have launched probes into the matter.
The company is already suing its president and 18 other executives, past and present, for up to 3.6 billion yen in compensation for the accounting scam, which has halved Olympus' share price and put it under pressure to raise capital.
Fresh lawsuits against individual auditors would only add to what is already an extraordinary chapter in Japanese corporate governance, with Olympus being mostly run and internally audited by people it is suing for mismanagement or a failure of duty.
Olympus said last week that all board members subject to the lawsuit would quit at an emergency shareholders meeting to be held in March or April.

OLYMPUS LIKELY TO KEEP LISTING
A decision, however, to clear the auditing firms could bolster Olympus' chances of keeping its Tokyo Stock Exchange listing, a critical prerequisite for its campaign to remain an independent company with access to fresh equity capital.
Suing Ernst & Young ShinNihon would likely leave it without an auditor and make it hard to meet exchange requirements. But Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) is still looking into the auditors' roles.
"We believe KPMG hasn't done anything wrong and will be cleared by Japanese regulators," Hideyo Uchiyama, chairman of KPMG Asia Pacific, told Reuters on the sidelines of a presentation in Taipei.
"At this point, KPMG has not made changes in the way it supervises its local unit, as it is waiting for the regulators' ruling," he added, speaking through an interpreter.
The Tokyo exchange has yet to conclude whether Olympus should remain listed.
Olympus has admitted to having used improper accounting tricks to conceal massive investment losses under a scheme that began in the 1990s, when Japanese stock markets had fallen heavily and the yen strengthened markedly.
The scandal came to light after Olympus fired its British chief executive, Michael Woodford, in October, prompting him to blow the whistle on the firm's dubious bookkeeping.
Woodford later launched a campaign to be reinstated but withdrew after failing to win support from Japanese institutional investors.
An Olympus shareholder filed suit on Tuesday against 14 past and present directors for firing Woodford, asking them to pay damages of 1.34 billion yen ($17.5 million) to the company, lawyers for the shareholder - an individual residing in Nara, western Japan - said in a statement.
The fraud relied on complex transactions, many of them involving offshore vehicles, which were presented in Olympus' financial statements as legitimate acquisitions or investments.
It was only late last year that some of these deal payments were exposed as shams, especially a $687 million advisory fee paid to a boutique U.S. financial firm for the $2 billion acquisition of British medical equipment firm Gyrus in 2008. At a third of the purchase price, the fee was the world's largest.
Tuesday's report found former standing corporate auditors Minoru Ota and Katsuo Komatsu, current outside corporate auditors Makoto Shimada and Yasuo Nakamura, and current standing corporate auditor Tadao Imai had breached their fiduciary duty.
It also held Ota responsible for 3.7 billion yen in damages. He headed the accounting division in the 1990s.
The other four were collectively held responsible for about 4.7 billion yen in damages because they had overlooked Olympus directors' illegal activities, it added.
A panel set up by Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC to review its auditing of Olympus said last month it had not found any problems, although a separate investigative committee appointed by Olympus had been critical of the auditors' role.
KPMG's chairman, Michael Andrew, said in November that his firm had done the right thing in its actions regarding Olympus.
Olympus President Shuichi Takayama will hold a news conference on Wednesday at 1 p.m. (0400 GMT), the company said, to discuss its response to the panel's report.
Olympus shares fell 2.1 percent to their lowest close since January 6, while the benchmark Nikkei average rose 1 percent.

($1 = 76.84 Japanese yen)
(Additional reporting by Mari Saito in Tokyo and Faith Hung in Taipei; Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by Mark Bendeich and Ian Geoghegan)
Źródło: Reuters

KPMG Warned, Then Got ‘Careless’ in Olympus Accounting Fraud

December 11, 2011
By Mariko Yasu

Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- KPMG LLP’s Tokyo affiliate signed off on Olympus Corp.’s 2009 results five days after the auditor confronted its camera-making client over accounting irregularities, according to the findings of a month-long probe.

KPMG Azsa LLC auditors challenged President Tsuyoshi Kikukawa and other executives over more than $600 million in takeover advisory fees and payments on other acquisitions, according to the report of an independent investigation into Olympus’s accounts. KPMG approved the company’s financial statement after an outside experts’ report Olympus commissioned justified the takeover costs.

The failure to uncover the $1.7 billion fraud that took place over more than a decade has damaged Japan’s credibility and highlighted a corporate culture of “yes men,” investigators led by a former judge reported this week. KPMG and Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC, which took over as auditors, face questions from regulators over their roles in the scandal.

“At the end of the day, it’s the company that pays the fees to auditors,” said Yuuki Sakurai, president at Fukoku Capital Management in Tokyo. “Your business would soon run into trouble if you got a reputation as a firm that goes running to regulators without solid evidence.”

On May 21, just over a week after KPMG Azsa had approved the accounts, Olympus’s Kikukawa visited the firm and told the auditors their contract would not be renewed. KPMG Azsa and Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC failed to conduct an adequate handover, the panel said.

E&Y Committee

Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC set up a committee to probe its auditing of Olympus, according to a statement on the accounting firm’s website yesterday. ShinNihon said it plans to release the findings as soon as the group reports.

The independent investigation into Olympus concluded there wasn’t any problem with ShinNihon’s auditing, the accounting firm said yesterday. “There were parts where our explanation fell short and we plan to follow up.”

Japan’s Financial Services Agency is looking into any role the auditors may have played in the Olympus cover-up, Minister Shozaburo Jimi said. “I’d like to see appropriate action carried out on this case,” he said today. KPMG and Ernst & Young combined audit nine of Japan’s 15 biggest companies, including NTT Docomo Inc. and Honda Motor Co.

“We will fully cooperate with regulators investigating this incident and make efforts to carry on with our business so that we can help develop Japan’s capital market,” KPMG Azsa said in a faxed statement on Dec. 7.

Don’t Publish

KPMG Azsa had told Olympus as early as April 2009 not to publish its May 12 earnings unless the two could agree on the accounting for fees awarded to Axes America LLC in the form of preference shares for the $2.1 billion takeover of Gyrus Group Plc, a U.K. medical equipment company, the independent panel’s report said. The panel vindicated Michael Woodford, who was fired as Olympus’s first foreign president and chief executive officer on Oct. 14 after he confronted the board over the fees, paid to a now-defunct Cayman Islands fund, Axam Investment Ltd.

“The auditing firm did point out that a part of the transaction was unreasonable, thus the checks-and-balances function could have possibly worked,” the report said. However, the auditor “carelessly relied on the outside experts’ report.”

Accounting Change

KPMG Audit Plc in Cardiff, Wales, questioned the preference shares in Gyrus’s 2009 accounts filed to Companies House in the U.K. in March 2010. The firm ceased being an auditor in part because of its client’s accounting for the securities, it said in a letter to directors that was filed to Companies House the following month.

By the time Ernst & Young signed off on Gyrus’s 2010 financial statement at year later, the U.K. company had revised earnings for 2009 because it “incorrectly recorded” the preference shares at nominal value. Gyrus booked the securities in its year-end accounts at $620 million, the same amount it paid to Axam.

Both KPMG and Ernst & Young’s U.K. arms said they weren’t given sufficient information about the identities of Axes or Axam to know whether the payments were to a related party.

The investigators’ report this week traced a web of offshore companies set up by Olympus and a network of mostly Japanese financial advisers that were used to hide 118 billion yen ($1.5 billion) of losses dating back to the 1990s. Olympus last month admitted the fees and more than $700 million written off the value of three other deals were part of its loss-hiding scheme.

Commerzbank, SocGen, LGT

In a meeting on May 7, 2009, KPMG Azsa told the Olympus executives, including Hideo Yamada and Hisashi Mori, that unless they gave a better explanation of the fees and payments made to offshore funds KPMG Azsa may be forced to resign as auditor, the report said. Yamada and Mori both quit from Olympus’s board last week.

The 185-page report on the investigation also said KPMG Azsa failed to verify whether Olympus’s overseas deposits at Frankfurt-based Commerzbank AG and Paris-based Societe Generale SA in Singapore, and LGT Bank AG in Liechtenstein were genuine. The three banks didn’t respond to KPMG Azsa’s requests for collateral information on the accounts, the report said.

Olympus used the deposits as collateral to extend loans to offshore vehicles that were then used to buy impaired financial assets. The outflow of money was hidden as Olympus accountants instructed the banks not to respond to the auditor’s inquiries on collateral obligations, the report said.

Full Compliance

“We have been fully cooperating with the third-party committee, said Christof Buri, a spokesman for LGT Group in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. “We contacted them in November on our own initiative.” He said the bank had no further comment on the report.

“At all times Commerzbank was in full compliance with all relevant laws and obligations and will assist with any possible enquiries by the regulator,” said Margarita Thiel, a Singapore- based spokeswoman. SocGen’s Singapore-based spokeswoman Kate Henley declined to comment.

In 1999, auditors Asahi & Co., which became KPMG Azsa in 2004, discovered Olympus had removed a loss from its books in a practice known as “tobashi” or “to make fly away,” the report said. Olympus unwound that transaction at the auditors’ request, according to the report.

The use of at least 17 Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands entities and the collusion of a “rotten” core of senior managers helped keep the auditors from the facts, the report said.

--Editors: Ben Richardson, Peter Langan, Garry Smith
To contact the reporter on this story: Mariko Yasu in Tokyo at myasu@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ben Richardson at brichardson8@bloomberg.net
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