Bank Of Japan Is Buying Bonds From Scandal-Hit Kobe Steel

Last week, the simmering scandal involving Japan’s third largest steel producer exploded, when following reports that Kobe Steel had falsified data about the quality of its steel, aluminum, copper, iron powder and other products it sold to customers across virtually every single industry, Japan’s Nikkei also reported that some Kobe Steel plants in Japan had been falsifying product quality data for decades, well beyond the roughly 10-year time frame given by the lying steelmaker. Worse, not only did the company, having already been caught, lie to shareholders and rule-abiding employees how long this illegal behavior had been going on, but – in a glaring example of corporate idiocy – had effectively enshrined and codified its fraudulent ways, as the cheating procedures eventually became institutionalized in what was a fraud manual, allowing the practice to continue as managers came and went.
As all this was taking place, not only did the stock price of Kobe Steel plunge, but its bonds tumbled sending its default probability sharply higher.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Oct 22, 2017.