JAPAN:Takafumi Horie, the young entrepreneur who built an empire of smoke and mirrors before losing it in a struggle with conservative Japan, has been sentenced to two years and six months for fraud.
The former head of the Internet firm Livedoor - who amassed a fortune in excess of €4.5 billion - maintained his innocence throughout the six-month trial, calling charges that he cooked his company's books "malicious" and claiming that he was framed.
But presiding judge Toshiyuki Kosaka said that testimony from Livedoor executives, including chief financial officer Ryoji Miyauchi, showed that Horie had played a key role in inflating the value of the firm and deserved "strong criticism" for deceiving investors.
The judges were not swayed by a tearful closing appeal from Horie in which he criticised the "over-zealousness" of prosecutors. "I worked so hard for the public and myself after the company was established," he said. "Spending 90 days in custody was hard."
The verdict was accompanied by wall-to-wall media coverage in Japan, where Horie's unconventional approach and champagne lifestyle upset many in the business world.
The iconic 34-year-old university dropout wore jeans to work, drove a Ferrari and once wrote a best-selling book entitled How to Make 10 Billion Yen, which won him thousands of young fans. But his attempt to take over a baseball team in 2004 and a media group the following year brought him into conflict with an older conservative business culture.
Many executives openly disdained the freewheeling, get-rich-quick style of capitalism which Horie is credited with pioneering in Japan, where the route to corporate power is usually a slow steady plod through the business ranks.
In interviews since his arrest last year Horie alleged that he was the victim of a conspiracy by the bureaucrats and politicians - what he called the "jealous elite of old Japan" - who resented how he had snubbed standard business practices.
Livedoor shares nosedived after his arrest, losing $5 billion (€3.7 billion) in value and sparking a temporary meltdown of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. When the stock was finally de-listed from the exchange last April it was worth 94 yen a share.
Horie maintained throughout his trial and in the media that he knew nothing about accounting and left his executives in charge of the day-to-day running of the company, which began life as a web-design start-up.
But e-mails and other evidence convinced the judges that he was aware that his employees were window-dressing accounts and setting up dummy firms in an attempt to boost Livedoor's share price. Horie's fate was sealed by testimony from his former right-hand man and other Livedoor executives.
There is much speculation about what will happen to Horie, who appealed the verdict, in the future. He told interviewers that he had no intention of going back into business in Japan, preferring instead to nurture his dream of space travel.
"I don't see any meaning in corporations, so I don't really understand why people keep asking me whether I want to establish one again," he told the Japan Times recently. "From now on I'll just do what I want."
