Toshiba interim CEO Muromachi to stay on in role

[TOKYO] Toshiba Corp has decided to propose interim President Masashi Muromachi as a more permanent chief executive officer beyond September after a slew of executives resigned over their roles in the country's biggest accounting scandal in years, Japanese media said on Tuesday.

The Japanese computers-to-nuclear conglomerate had said last week that then-chairman Muromachi would temporarily assume the CEO role after an independent probe found that former CEO Hisao Tanaka had been aware the company had inflated its profits by US$1.2 billion over a period of several years.

A Toshiba spokesman said nothing had been decided.

The Asahi daily said the decision was made by the company's appointments committee, which includes external directors. Toshiba is expected to propose the plan at an extraordinary shareholders' meeting in September, the paper said, without citing sources.

Muromachi is considered a safe pair of hands to lead Toshiba through its current turmoil and was not implicated in the accounting irregularities that saw the departure of eight officials last week.

The third-party committee's report last week said Mr Tanaka and then-vice chairman Norio Sasaki had pressured business divisions to meet difficult targets and knew they were overstating profits and delaying the reporting of losses, amid a culture of not going against the wishes of superiors.

REUTERS