Olympus is seeing red. A lot of it, in fact. The camera makers has just revealed a massive $1.1bn hole in its finances, in the wake of the corruption scandal that has dogged it since earlier this year.
Five ‘corrected’ yearly financial statements have been revealed to the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Dec 14, the deadline set by regulators who demanded the restatements after an independent report made public last week revealed how the Japanese giant hid up to $1.5bn of losses.
The restated accounts to the end of June 2011 sliced $1.3bn off company net assets.
The revised figures show a net loss of 32.33 billion yen ($400 million) for the six months to September.
Shares slumped 14 percent to 1,128 yen Tokyo Stock Exchange after the news.
Olympus, who also make medical equipment, may now be forced to merge or even sell off assets in order to get its self out of the deep crisis it now finds itself in, which began after British CEO Michael Woodford called into question a series of ‘extraordinary’ payments being made to ‘obscure’ financial advisers.
Woodford was later sacked and Chairman and President Tsuyoshi Kikukawa also resigned in the wake of the scandal.
“The core part of the management was rotten, and that contaminated other parts around it,” the 200-page report published last week stated.
