UPDATE: Ex-Olympus CEO Woodford Suing Olympus For Wrongful Dismissal
06 January 2012 - 4:08PM
Dow Jones News
Ousted Olympus Corp. (7733.TO) Chief Executive Officer Michael
Woodford said Friday he plans to sue his former employer for firing
him without any legal basis, only hours after announcing his
decision to drop his attempt to retake the company's reins.
Woodford, who was dismissed as CEO and president in October
after exposing an accounting scandal at Olympus, said he has
already filed a lawsuit against the company with a tribunal court
in the U.K. and that another lawsuit in Japan may follow.
The Olympus board's decision to fire him long before his
four-year contract had expired "had absolutely no legal basis,"
Woodford said in a group interview at his hotel room in central
Tokyo.
He also said he will seek "substantial and significant" damages
from Olympus, while declining to specify the amount.
An Olympus spokesman said the company cannot comment as it
hasn't yet confirmed that Woodford has filed a lawsuit.
Woodford's announcement of the lawsuit came after he released a
statement earlier Friday saying he has called off his proxy
challenge to return to Olympus as the head of a new management
team.
In the statement, he said the major reason for discontinuing the
battle was an absence of support from Japanese institutional
investors.
Woodford and some major foreign institutional shareholders of
Olympus have called for the resignation of all the company's board
members for having failed to heed Woodford's warnings about
accounting irregularities and voting to dismiss him.
"Why have (Japanese institutional investors) not made any
criticism of the current board?" Woodford asked rhetorically.
Olympus's major creditors, led by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.,
have not supported Woodford in his bid to replace the current
board. Sumitomo Mitsui spurned his request to speak with the bank's
president.
"I think we could have won a proxy fight," said Woodford, who
had been seeking investor support for an alternate slate of
directors to be proposed at the next shareholders' meeting as early
as March.
"But even if I won, what was I coming back to to?" he said,
adding that it would be difficult to run a Japanese company with an
absence of support from Japanese institutional investors and
banks.
Woodford said that a key event that first made him rethink his
plan to launch a proxy battle was an Olympus press conference
during his last visit to Japan last month, during which President
Shuichi Takayama said that not all the current board members needed
to be replaced at once.
The fact that Japanese institutional investors still didn't
criticize the current board after Takayama's comment was "shocking"
and "discrediting for the country," Woodford said.
Still, he said he made his final decision to drop the proxy
battle Thursday, after discussions with investors and people who
could have been candidates for his slate of proposed directors.
Woodford, who holds Olympus shares, said he hasn't yet decided
whether he will attend the next shareholders' meeting.
-By Juro Osawa, Dow Jones Newswires; +81-3-6269-2794;
juro.osawa@dowjones.com
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