Daily Lessons from Life 21 February 2012 - Top Olympus executive found dead in India park: Paper

"Tuesday, Feb 21, 2012 Reuters - Top Olympus executive found dead in India park: Paper

NEW DELHI - A top executive of Japan's scandal-ridden Olympus Corp was found hung to death outside his apartment in suburban Delhi in a likely suicide, police said on Tuesday.

Tsutomu Omori, 49, head of the company's medical equipment business in India, appeared to have killed himself late Sunday, Lal Singh, investigating officer of Gurgaon Police told Reuters.

Earlier this month, Tokyo police arrested seven top executives of Olympus Corp for their alleged involvement in the accounting fraud, one of Japan's biggest corporate scandals in recent times."

This corporate scandal has been around for a while now since the British CEO, who blew the whistle, and gotten fired by the Company. A lot of interests in this case as the outsiders were wondering how would the famously or infamously insulate Japanese corp folks will deal with such a 'tragedy'. Well, the answer was: the CEO still did not get re-hire back. The Board stayed the way it were. That is the business side. But then, the Tokyo police decided to arrest some senior executives. That turns up the heat ...

Lessons for me are:

1. while the scandal supposedly was to cover losses for the Corporate and nobody benefited personally, it is still a fraud case for the minority shareholders!;

2. the insulate Japanese corporate folks sent a signal to the world that Japanese corporate elites work differently from the rest of the world or at least the so-called capitalist society with activist shareholders;

3. at the end of the day, whatever cover up and manupilation and careful and perfect planning and executing, the truth will always emerge. It is a matter of when and not if the truth will emerge. That should be enough warning to anyone who will tempt fate by say: it will be different for me as I am smarter and luckier than all the others before me!

May he rest in peace and hopefully he committed suicide for something else and not for this scandal. Death is too much a price to pay for committing corporate fraud. Really.