Japan's Mitsubishi Electric Corporation said on 20, will punish 22 current and former executives involved in data fraud. The company was exposed to falsification of inspection data which continued for more than 30 years.
According to the final investigation report of an external panel of experts, Mitsubishi Electric's 22 production sites in Japan, there are 17 data falsification and other misconduct, involving a total of 197 cases, the most recent of which lasted until August of this year. Of these incidents, 112 were deliberate, and 62 involved managers.
Mitsubishi Electric reduced the monthly salaries of several current executives, including current President Kei Lacrima, and asked the executives involved to return some of their wages.
This fraud scandal first came to light in June of last year. Mitsubishi Electric in Nagasaki, a factory has been alleged since 1985 in the train air conditioner mass production or factory, not under the contract for product inspection, but falsified inspection data.
In addition, the plant also falsified the inspection data of air compressors, which mainly function when the train brakes and closes the doors, about operational safety.
As a result, the international certification body suspended the factory's ISO9001 international quality management system certification and the international railroad industry-standard certification on May 6.
It is worth noting that Mitsubishi Electric has six factories that have been canceled or suspended due to quality control fraud and other issues related to international certification.
Mitsubishi Electric commissioned a third-party investigation that found that the company's transformer data fraud dates back to at least 1982, a span of 40 years.
The nearly 3,400 transformers involved were sold both inside and outside Japan, including to Japanese railroad companies and operating nuclear power plants. According to the Japanese media investigation, at least nine Japanese nuclear power plants were involved.
Mitsubishi Electric data falsification exposure, the company's then chairman Masaki Geyama and then president Takeshi Sugiyama resigned last year.
In October 2017, steel producer Kobe Steel admitted to falsifying some of its copper and aluminum product inspection data to supply customers with substandard products; In November of the same year, the non-ferrous metal giant Mitsubishi Materials, which is under the banner of Mitsubishi Electric, admitted that its subsidiaries Mitsubishi Cable Industries and Mitsubishi Shin Copper had falsified product data.
In July 2018, Nissan Motor Co. admitted to falsifying exhaust emissions and fuel consumption measurement data at five of the company's plants in Japan.
Credibility is crucial to a company's operations, and it would be a huge disaster for customers and partners to lose trust in a company. However, in some countries, falsifications occur repeatedly, and eventually, these companies can only go down the drain.
