Six months into its financial crisis, Toshiba is shaping up as the Sistine Chapel of corporate catastrophes: you have to lie on your back to appreciate its scale, and once you get your eye in, the beauty is mesmerising.It is also a picture that, to committed contrarians and true believers in corporate governance reform, whispers “buy Japan”. At the very least, Toshiba stands to give the Tokyo stock market a new note from which everything else will in future be tuned.Toshiba’s mess is usefully eye-catching. In the past two weeks alone, Toshiba has lurched from lawsuit to counter-lawsuit with a key business ally, Western Digital; it has been told that it will be downgraded to the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and kicked out of the Nikkei 225 Average; its auditor refuses to sign off on the accounts for the most recent financial year; and it has watched arguably its best hope of financial salvation — the $18bn sale of the memory chip business — being blown off course. read the rest here
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