SFO drops charges against Olympus over auditor role

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has dropped charges against the Olympus Corporation and Gyrus Group Ltd following a Court of Appeal judgment handed down in February that English law does not criminalise the misleading of auditors by the company being audited.

The SFO said it could offer no evidence against the company in the case which stemmed from the £1.1bn accounting scandal uncovered by the group’s former CEO, Michael Woodford, who turned whistleblower shortly after being appointed the company’s first non-Japanese CEO in 2011.

Earlier this year Olympus admitted that 92 organisations, including foreign institutional investors and pension funds, had filed civil actions for damages of up to ¥36bn (£200m) for losses sustained after Olympus shares lost almost three quarter of their value when the irregularities came to light at the end of 2011.