The Recruit Cosmos Co scandal of shares allocated to key Japanese politicians and industrialists at rock-bottom prices ahead of the company’s highly successful flotation has now reached right to the top of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, where the chairman Hisashi Shinto has resigned in the wake of revelations that profits from the sale of shares in the property company had been deposited in his bank account: although the transactions were not strictly illegal, conflict of interest is alleged, because the information services side of Recruit Co resells capacity on NTT lines, and bought two supercomputers from the phone company at what appeared to be knockdown prices; the top-heavy price of NTT shares has taken a battering as details of the scandal have come out, and are now trading at the equivalent of $14,365m, having fallen another $162 on the resignation.
