In 2011, the company gained coverage in global media when it fired after two weeks its newly appointed British chief executive Michael Woodford, a 30 year Olympus veteran, and Olympus' president and chief operating officer since April that year, who had sought to probe financial irregularities and unexplained payments of hundreds of millions of dollars following his appointment as CEO. Although the board initially dismissed Woodford's concerns via mass media as being "disruptive" actions and Woodford as failing to grasp local culture, the matter quickly snowballed into a corporate corruption scandal over concealment of more than 117.7 billion Yen of investment losses and other dubious fees and other payments dating back to the late 1980s and suspicion of covert payments to criminal organizations. By 2012 the scandal had developed into one of the biggest and longest-lived loss-concealing financial scandals in the history of corporate Japan; it had wiped 75 - 80% off the company's stock market valuation, led to the resignation of much of the board, investigations across Japan, the UK and US, the arrest of 11 past or present Japanese directors, senior managers, auditors and bankers of Olympus for alleged criminal activities or cover-up, and raised considerable turmoil and concern over Japan's prevailing corporate governance and transparency and the Japanese financial markets.
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