April 12, 2010
Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent
An acrimonious spat in the boardroom of Fujitsu has plunged one of Japan’s most revered companies into an innuendo-laden pantomime of manipulative powerbrokers, fake hospital visits, lawsuits and alleged associations with yakuza gangsters.
The next few days could prove to be even more spectacular. Within the next 24 hours Fujitsu, one of the world’s biggest technology companies, is planning to hold a press conference to face questions over whether it cajoled its president, Kuniaki Nozoe, to resign under false pretenses and then concocted a story about the state of his health to deceive the stock market.
Lawyers for a fund based in London and Japan, which claims that its reputation and business has been savaged by allegations of links to organised crime arising from Mr Nozoe’s resignation, told The Times that they were planning to sue three individual Fujitsu board members for damages this week.
That legal action would ride in tandem with a shareholder lawsuit planned by Mr Nozoe against two of those three executives and claiming that their alleged conspiracy to have him removed from power cost the company 5 billion yen (£35 million) in failed business transactions.
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Lurking in the background is the unprecedented behaviour of Mr Nozoe since his resignation last September: he has not retreated quietly to the usual Japanese corporate pastures of golf and sinecure board memberships.
Instead he has started a campaign to prevent “an abnormal situation in which I was forced to resign behind closed doors, for fabricated reasons” from happening again.
His lawyers admit that the very public imbroglio has been exceptionally “un-Japanese” — a sign, some observers suggest, that the old conventions and eccentricities of corporate Japan are being rattled to destruction.
The circumstances of Mr Nozoe’s resignation are riddled with inconsistencies and wildly differing accounts. Fujitsu, which has issued statements on the matter but held no press conference, has performed at least one significant U-turn — effectively admitting in early March that it lied in its original statement to the market about Mr Nozoe’s non-existent illness, drawing a rebuke from the Tokyo Stock Exchange authorities.
The real reason for the resignation, Fujitsu now maintains, was that in February last year Mr Nozoe was pursuing a project which involved a third-party company that “was said to have an unfavourable reputation”.
Mr Nozoe’s version of events, as described by his lawyer, contends that after holding the post of president for less than two years he was pushed out by forces unhappy with the pace and vigour with which he was reforming Fujitsu. Specifically, his lawyers point to the resistance of Naoyuki Akikusa, a board member for 22 years and a recognised kingmaker within the company.
Last September, while preparing for a board meeting less than an hour away, Mr Nozoe was called into a windowless room in the company's Tokyo headquarters. According to his version of events he was told by a delegation from that board that one of his acquaintances — a former Credit Suisse banker who had worked with numerous Fujitsu executives and now ran a small investment group called Sandringham Private Value — had links with “antisocial forces”. Knowing that the phrase was a common Japanese euphemism for the yakuza, and assuming that this information had come from the police, Mr Nozoe felt he had no choice but to resign immediately.
Mr Nozoe claims that this was the first time he had heard the allegation of yakuza connections: Fujitsu says that he was warned about the “inappropriate” acquaintance several months before the showdown.
Even as he was being forced out, say his lawyers, Mr Nozoe believed that he would still have a significant and well-paid role at the company. To secure this he even played along with Fujitsu’s public explanation for the resignation and made highly visible visits to hospital.
“When he got to the hospital he never saw a doctor, because he was in good health,” said his lawyer, Kei Hata. “He had a slightly stiff shoulder and did have some acupuncture.”
Lawyers for Sandringham strongly reject the allegations that any of their executives have links to organised crime and are make preparations for a lawsuit that would hand Fujitsu the burden of proving where the idea came from. Fujitsu has so far provided no hard evidence of any connection, insisting to Mr Nozoe merely that it was “generally known” that his acquaintance had those suspect links.
Having learnt how strongly Sandringham felt able to fight its corner, Mr Nozoe was fortified in his resolve to take on his tormentors on the board. Three weeks ago he filed a petition in Yokohama to be reinstated to his old position: last week his lawyers withdrew that after declaring that the evidence Fujitsu had presented was “incomprehensible”.
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