Olympus Inquiry Said to Include Banks

Olympus, a Japanese endoscope and digital camera maker, admitted this month that it kept investment losses off its books for two decades as part of a cover-up. But many questions remain about how Olympus managed to obscure the losses for so long and how much outside help the company may have received.

According to the person close to the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly, regulators are looking into whether managers handling Olympus’s accounts at several European banks provided inaccurate or misleading statements of the company’s accounts.

The investigation is examining whether the bank statements were then used by Olympus to generate financial statements that misstated the company’s true health, the person said.

He refused to name the banks, saying investigations were still continuing.

Allegations of complicity by Olympus’s bankers come as the company’s recently sacked president, Michael C. Woodford, returned to Japan from his native Britain to meet with local authorities who are investigating Olympus’s finances — and to confront the company’s board over his firing.

Mr. Woodford was fired in mid-October after he questioned more than $1.4 billion in irregular merger payments made before his tenure. Olympus has since admitted that those payouts were part of its cover-up of past losses.

Mr. Woodford, who remains a director, has demanded that the entire board resign over the cover-up. He has also offered to return to the helm of the company to help it restructure and clean up its books.

At the board meeting Friday at company headquarters, which Mr. Woodford described as tense, there was no talk of reinstating him as president, he said, adding, “The directors know that they have to leave to bring credibility back to the company.”

Under pressure, Olympus said Thursday the board was indeed prepared to step down once the company was on the road to recovery, though the company gave no timeline for the resignations. Also on Thursday, three executives who Olympus says were behind the cover-up resigned from the company.

Although Olympus has not detailed the system by which it hid the losses, it is thought to have used a once common accounting maneuver known as “tobashi.” In tobashi, translated loosely as “to blow away,” a company hides losses on bad assets by selling those assets to other companies, often dummies, only to buy them back later. That allows the company with the bad assets to temporarily mask losses, and pay them off when company finances improve.

Those payments are usually disguised as acquisition fees or write-downs.

At Olympus, under scrutiny are $687 million in fees paid in 2008 to an obscure financial adviser in the Cayman Islands for Olympus’s acquisition of the British medical equipment maker Gyrus — fees equal to about a third of the $2 billion acquisition price and more than 30 times the going rate for such services.

According to an e-mail exchange dated Oct. 6 between Mr. Woodford and Olympus’s compliance officer, Hisashi Mori, the company used two European banks to transfer funds to Axam, the Gyrus acquisition adviser incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

The e-mail, provided by Mr. Woodford, said Olympus used one bank to remit $210 million and the other to remit $410 million.

One of the banks requested a copy of the underlying agreement between Olympus and Axam, according to the e-mail. Such a request is unusual and a sign that the bank had concerns about the payment. It is unclear, however, if either bank flagged financial regulators to the transaction.

Neither bank has been accused of wrongdoing, and neither has been identified as the subject of an investigation by Japanese authorities.

Yoshiaki Yamada, a Tokyo-based spokesman for Olympus, said he could not comment on details of ongoing investigations or on the authenticity of the e-mails provided by Mr. Woodford. The company has threatened to sue its former president for leaking internal documents, however.

Tobashi was made infamous by Yamaichi Securities, which hid over $2 billion in losses before collapsing in 1997. Yamaichi was then Olympus’s preferred broker.

The brokerage firm also previously admitted to making improper payments of about 1 billion yen to Olympus to cover stock market losses, part of a scandal that involved nearly every big company in the country.

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