The Recruit Cosmos scandal that has been raging over the purchase at knock-down prices of unlisted shares in this property subsidiary of the Recruit Inc Japanese computer publishing company and employment agency by the private secretaries of the top men in the land (and the implication that the bosses actually made big profits when the company went public), has forced the resignation of Kozo Murata, the private secretary to the chairman of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, Hisashi Shinto, and, as reported briefly (CI No 1,050), has also led to questions being asked about the sale of two Cray supercomputers to Recruit by NTT in 1987, when NTT resold its Cray X-MP/18 and X-MP/216, bought in 1984, to Recruit, for a very low price: various reasons have been suggested for the sale including one that Recruit may have been avoiding pressure from the Ministry of International Trade & Industry to buy domestically; Cray sources were reported originally as saying that the re-sale was an unprecedented transaction but at a press conference in Tokyo last week, NTT president Yamaguchi handed around a letter from a Cray vice president which amended the comment to say that although he had said that he was not aware of another example of this type of sale, the sale was quite normal – really too kind.
