Michael Woodford glances out of the floor-to-ceiling window of his multimillion-pound loft apartment, which looks out across the River Thames toward the City of London, the so-called Square Mile that is among the world¡¯s leading financial and commercial centers.
The 52-year-old Briton has effectively been jobless since being ousted for the part he played in Japan¡¯s own Enron scandal, when he blew the whistle last autumn on a 13-year, ?130-billion accounting fraud at Olympus Corp., the global company he was running at the time.
Woodford, who was already president, had been appointed chief executive officer only two weeks earlier ¡ª groomed after 30 years, most of which had been spent in Europe, at the maker of cameras and endoscopes. ¡°I¡¯d proved in America and Europe that I understood the business. I wasn¡¯t a bureaucrat. I¡¯d proven that I could realize the potential of Olympus,¡± he says emphatically.
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