Yesterday I replied to a comment by Valentín Sama at his blog, and he replied as well, including a message he had received from someone. Since it is public, I reproduce it here (you can find the original in the comments to this post at Sama's blog), because in my opinion, it puts some needed light on the Olympus scandal that threatens to destroy the company:
"In a perverse way, this makes me think that Olympus might be okay, and
also explained to me why they were so pissed off at Woodford.
If the stories are correct, Olympus a long time ago made some really
bad investments and took a huge loss: this was back when the Japanese
economy was collapsing after a real estate bubble, much as ours did
three years ago.
In an effort to avoid admitting a disastrous mistake (and taking the
full hit then, which might have been the end of the company), they hid
the loss, and then, using what otherwise would have been profits, they
slowly over the years replaced the lost money: it didn't go out too the
Yakuza, it wasn't some huge transfer of money to the families of the
board members.
It suggests that Olympus is capable of making quite a lot of money,
enough to replace those losses, and still show enough profit to keep
the shareholders around.
If Woodford hadn't blown the whistle, they might have pulled it
off.
Now that it's out in the open, nobody knows what will
happen. By the way, I'm not defending Olympus, I'm just
saying that for the first time, we might be starting to understand what
happened, and why."
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