An independent in-house committee of lawyers is set to investigate Olympus Corp.'s admission that it may have illegally paid dividends to stockholders.
The company said it will hold an extraordinary shareholders meeting by April to propose the creation of a new management system, but confusion over the firm's operation, stemming from the alleged covering up of past investment losses, is likely to continue in the wake of the dividend payments revelations.
On Thursday, the camera and medical equipment maker said there was a period in which the company had no distributable profits. "As a result, we believe dividend payouts [during the period] were illegal," the head of the firm's accounting section, Nobuyuki Onishi said, at a press conference in Tokyo. (Yomiuri)
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