Week 5, Fadhil's Blog #2 - Documentaries: Olympus FRAUD!?

In this week famous Fadhil's blog, we goin' to talk about the popular Japanese photography company Olympus, which in 2011 it was very famous due to its scandal of fraud that the makes the company loss around $1.7 Billion. Amazing isn't it? That much loss of money that goes into individuals pocket, they must be very rich now I must say. The main question about this case is that, Does telling the truth worth the risk to take? Yes, definitely! But for several groups of individuals this is probably a not sure question. But it is obvious that nowadays telling the truth is a hard thing to do and not many people wants to take the risk. However, in my opinion, telling the truth is still the right thing to do and it will wroth the risk. Although, we need to take the risk more carefully and full of awareness like playing a chess since we know that others are also playing mind games, thus we need to be careful of people around us.  In today's business world, I only can see people are too focusing on their personal achievements, such as purchasing sports cars, luxury mansions, or perhaps other fancy stuffs, while forgetting the positive business ethics. Leaders or Managers are supposed to be achieving company goals and satisfying shareholders if any rather than fulfilling their personal dreams and fantasies.

In the relation to Olympus fraud, the case is actually known to the public due to the former president Michael Woodford "blew the whistle" about the 1.7 billion money fraud with his friends and other managements in this multinational camera and optical instruments company, which is very amazing and surprising I must say. Like how much guts does this man have to say open a big lies!? Did he get scared of criminals who took the money will come after his family for telling the truth to public? As a result of questioning numbers of dubious transactions to his senior executives, Michael was dismissed from his position in the company. Back with the main question of "is telling the truth worth the risk?" As I can see from the case, Michael could have just taken advantage from the situation if only he did not question about the false information that the company put in its financial statements. But he got fired by the company and Dismissed from his position, and making him the "whistleblower" in order for Olympus to get a special audit. 

So how does this fraud shows or known? the answer is by special auditing that is done by Japanese supreme court which resulting an obvious information of Olympus filled false information since they disguised the losses from failed investment in fees and overvalued payments. As a huge company, I see that it is very easy to edit and customise the data or even hide some of it since a company like Olympus definitely contains numerous transactions and activities. They did everything including illegal ones in purpose to form a better financial statements. As I read on the news, from the people that are caught, everyone is Michael's friend or partners that he knew from 30 years ago which kinda shame knowing not one of them have ethical on mind. 

At the end, as a legendary company, I guess Olympus is embarrassed not only their own company but also other Japanese companies in terms of ethical issue. I also assume that the investors might want think more before investing in Japanese companies due to this scandal. Furthermore, the company "lost more than 75% of its share value" due to this incident (CNN, 2012). It is crazy how everyone in the company who manage the financial reports are involves in this thing. From this case, not only I see that how hard they tried it bad guys will always get caught, but government should also conduct more audit towards big companies that have massive amount of transactions in order to avoid this kind of scandal again.