A Japanese investment advisory firm has been frozen over missing pension funds in a major accounting scandal:
Japan froze operations Friday at an investment firm accused of losing most of the 183 billion yen in pension funds it manages, as a report said it may have hidden losses for years in an Olympus-style scandal.
The head of the Financial Services Agency (FSA), Shozaburo Jimi, suspended AIJ Investment Advisors until March 23 as it carries out a probe into one of the biggest cases of its kind in the country.
“The FSA, together with the labor ministry, will take every possible step to prevent this kind of incident from happening again,” he said, adding the agency would probe all 263 of Japan’s investment management firms as soon as possible.
The crackdown follows a December raid against another Japanese firm:
Dozens of black-suited investigators, marching double-file, raided the office building of three small Olympus Corp subsidiaries Wednesday, one of 20 sites searched in a probe of a $1.7 billion accounting scandal that threatens the once-proud Japanese medical device maker's survival.
The missing pension funds are the latest blow against savers reeling from oil price shocks exacerbated by Japan's
quantitative easing:
The Bank of Japan (BOJ) became the latest central bank to increase the size of its quantitative easing program at its monetary policy meeting on Tuesday. There, the BOJ raised the size of asset purchase plan by 10 trillion yen, or approximately $130 billion, from ¥55 trillion to ¥65 trillion. The entire amount will be earmarked for the purchase of Japanese government bonds.
Further increasing income inequality, it follows England's $50 billion QE injection. The freshly minted funds will help cover Greece's bailout package, which in turn will become “grease payments” to private banks in France, Germany, U.K., and Portugal respectively.