Nidec has published the officer-liability report it received on 16 October, with some parts withheld to protect trade secrets and personal privacy. The committee, headed by a lawyer and made up of two lawyers and an accountant, says nine former officers should answer to the company for the accounting failures. Earlier Tokyo Brief coverage
Who the committee holds liable
The committee concluded that six former directors, among them the founder and former presidents, are liable under Article 423(1) of the Companies Act, the provision on directors' liability to their company for neglect of duty. Two former full-time audit-committee members face the same provision. A former chief financial officer, who was an executive officer rather than a director, is liable under the Civil Code or Nidec's executive-officer rules. The committee says the extent of each person's liability should depend on his contribution.
The core finding is about method rather than a single deal. The committee says Nidec set an operating-profit target first and allowed impairments and write-offs only within it, reversing the normal order of accounting. It ties this to the asset-health project that began in November 2016 and to the restructuring in the final quarter of the year to March 2023. It also cites three cases in its own right at the car-parts business, covering a Mexican receivables unit, traction motors and inverters.
The committee did not hold everyone liable for damages. Two people whose lapses were limited to accounting cases at Nidec's precision-components subsidiary were not held liable, because the committee judged those cases too small and too unforeseeable a link to the group-wide restatement. It also found no evidence that the outside directors knew the details of the treatment policy.
The costs on the ledger
The committee counted three items as losses Nidec bore between August 2025 and August 2026. It adds that other crisis-management costs were incurred and that the total may grow.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Investigation costs | ¥22.2bn |
| Audit costs | ¥5.3bn |
| Tokyo Stock Exchange listing penalty | ¥91.2mn |
What happens next
The committee says it could not apportion damages by contribution and leaves that to a court in any liability suit. Its closing section says the report is not a final conclusion and contains matters that should be argued and proved in court for a judge's decision.
Nidec says it is weighing damages claims or other legal measures against the report and will disclose its decision promptly. It has not said it will sue.
Liability over surplus distributions is not in the report. The committee treated it as out of scope because Nidec has not filed corrected reports for earlier years, so past distributable amounts are uncertain. Nidec says it will consider a suit on that point once the prior-year statements are corrected. The committee also relied on pre-restatement filings because the auditor gave no opinion on the annual report filed on 30 September.