Japan started going down the gurgler, taking the rest of the world with it, on the day they arrested Horie on trumped up pathetic charges, to show him that the old geezers are in charge: forbes.com
They kept him in prison in solitary for 3 months which ensured Japan went down the gurgler as everyone panicked. Way to go guys.
He was accused of things like "splittism" aka dividing shares into two, which is normal for all companies other than Warren Buffets' Berkshire Hathaway. He was also accused of some minor activity which if it is a crime, it's doubtful, and even if it was a minor accounting wrong-doing, Horie was not involved. It was inconsequential and immaterial to Livedoor's value.
It was all a matter of "getting him".
See if you can spot the day they arrested Horie in 2006, after he had almost single handedly brought the Nikkei up from 11,000 to 17,000 finance.yahoo.com^N225#symbol=^N225;range=5y
Yes, the Nikkei battled back up over the next year, only to face reality as the arrest of Horie and stopping of Livedoor reverberated through the economy and into the world's capital markets. Of course it was the straw on the camel's back, with sub-prime and other financial foolishness setting the world up for a big crunch down, but it certainly didn't help.
<Villain Or Hero?
Tim Kelly, 04.05.09, 06:00 PM EDT
Three years after his arrest and conviction, Japan's battered and bruised super-entrepreneur, Takafumi Horie, is biting back.
In mid 2005, Takafumi Horie was on a celebrity rampage. A brash Internet businessman, he had become a hero to Japanese entrepreneurs tired of the staid, herd-loving executives they blamed for Japan losing its moxie.
Six months later, Horie was a villain, swapping his luxury Tokyo pad and rock-star lifestyle for a cramped cell as prosecutors built a case against him for falsely inflating profits. His arrest was widely interpreted in the media frenzy as the revenge of gray-haired men on an upstart that had gone too far.
Horie received a two-and-a-half-year sentence, which, if his final appeal fails this year, he will have to serve.
Unable to do any more to win over his judges, he's trying himself in a court of public opinion in a final bid to sway the court. The vehicle for his media comeback is a book, Total Resistance, which asks Japan to decide whether he's the goody or the baddy.
For all his defiance, Horie has lost some of the bravado that spurred him to bid for Fuji Television, one of Japan's most conservative broadcasters, and pushed him to run for political office. During his campaign, he eschewed the shirt and tie typical of Japanese politics in favor of a T-shirt with the word "reform" emblazoned across the front.
Most Japanese think it's safer to be just another face in the crowd. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down," is a well-worn expression that encapsulates the sentiment. In Horie's case, this turned out to be true.
Even if he avoids jail time, he has still lost hundreds of millions of dollars (he was on Forbes Asia's 40 Richest Japanese list in 2005). The Internet portal he founded, Livedoor, nearly went bust, and the new breed of businessmen he led was cowed into silence.
Horie bitterly describes his treatment at the hands of prosecutors. At a recent press luncheon, he seemed almost obsessive, launching into an angry description of the charges against him. Answering questions later, though, a more vulnerable side emerged.
His claim that he was unaware of accounting violations is not fully convincing, but when he bemoans his unfair treatment, he has a point. Japan's prosecutors run their own fiefdoms; entrepreneurs who stick out as much as Horie does are tempting scalps for ambitious officials. Once arrested, suspects can be held for weeks without being charged and have limited access to legal counsel. Interrogations are unrecorded, and because nearly everyone who ends up in court is convicted, the pressure to confess in exchange for leniency is intense.
After being held in solitary confinement for 95 days, Horie admits the isolation got to him. Waking at 7 a.m., he would eat and wash. He got to bathe twice a week and was let out for exercise every other day. Apart from interrogation sessions and legal meetings, he had nothing to do and nobody to talk to until lights-out at 9 p.m. "For the first time in my life, I was taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills," Horie reveals.
The chill that zealous prosecutors put on Japan's entrepreneurs is hard to measure, but it is a painful reminder of their lowly status, Horie insists. For two centuries, Japan had a rigid caste system--one with the samurai at the top, the farmers and craftsmen in the middle and the merchants at the bottom. "Japan has never really got over it," says Horie.
His return comes as that merchant class struggles to cope amid the downturn. Many graduates are opting for salaryman safety rather than risky start-ups. Albeit battered and bent, Horie is still sticking out, and flawed though he may be, he is a hero to Japan’s ballsy entrepreneurs.
See Also:
Unemployment Widens In Japan; New Stimulus Prepared >
Horie and Livedoor were all the stimulus Japan needed, with financial backing from Lehman Brothers and the mountains of cash sitting around in Japan waiting for entrepreneurs like Horie to do something useful.
Japan could help get things right by apologizing to Horie for vicious suffocatocratic stupidity, release him, give Livedoor $10 billion to restart and get the world going again. At least Japan, if not the world.
Mqurice |
