Daily Stock Market News

Japan investigators raid Dentsu in widening Olympic probe


TOKYO (AP) — Japanese prosecutors raided the headquarters of major advertising company Dentsu on Friday, as the investigation into corruption related to the Tokyo Olympics widened.

Major local TV broadcasters showed Tokyo District Prosecutors and Japan Fair Trade Commission officials entering Dentsu headquarters.

Dentsu dominates event organizing, marketing and public relations in Japan. It helped land the 2020 Games for Tokyo, and then lined up record domestic sponsorships.

Haruyuki Takahashi, a former executive at Dentsu, has been arrested four times in recent months on charges of receiving bribes from various companies that became sponsors for the Games.

The latest investigation centers around bid-rigging for places to be picked for test events, according to Japanese media reports. The test events started in 2018, spanning various sports including sailing and weightlifting, to prepare for the Olympics. Being chosen for test events is critical to being picked for actual Olympic venues.

The money that exchanged hands for the bid-rigging totaled 500 million yen ($3.6 million), involving nine companies and one organization, according to the newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun and other reports.

The companies involved in the earlier sponsorship scandal include Aoki Holdings, a clothing company that dressed Japan’s Olympic team, and Sun Arrow, which produced the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic mascots named Miraitowa and Someity.

Takahashi, in custody since August, had tremendous influence over running the Olympics. The bribes he is alleged to have taken total more than 190 million yen ($1.4 million).

Dentsu did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Cerespo, an event company that Japanese reports said also was raided on suspicion of involvement in bid-rigging, did not have an immediate comment.

Tokyo prosecutors do not comment on such daily news developments. But Deputy Chief Prosecutor Hiroshi Morimoto told reporters recently that the investigation was continuing on the Olympics.

Speculation has been growing the burgeoning scandal may tarnish Japan’s bid for the 2030 Winter Games. The 2020 Games were postponed for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic. The International Olympic Committee has said it’s watching Japan’s investigation, stressing it had “every interest in the full clarification of this case.”

___

Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

This article presents seven large-cap stocks that are regarded as cheap based on their price-to-earnings ratio. The price-to-earnings ratio tells an investor how much they are paying per share for every dollar of a company’s profit.

You can find a stock’s P/E ratio by dividing its stock price by its earnings per share. That looks like this:

P/E Ratio = Stock Price/Earnings per share (EPS)

For example, if a company is reporting earnings of $3 per share and their stock is selling for $30 per share, the P/E ratio is 10 ($30 per share/$3 per share). Many investors will look at a benchmark index like the S&P 500 as their guide for defining if a company’s P/E ratio makes a stock cheap or expensive. At the time of this writing, the average P/E ratio for stocks in the S&P 500 was   14x to 17x. That is the range we’re using for determining if a stock is cheap.

Of course, what is considered a “good” P/E ratio may depend on the market sector. For example, technology stocks tend to have a higher P/E ratio than the S&P average because they are projected to have stronger earnings and stock price growth than the broader market.

View the Stocks Here .





Read More: Japan investigators raid Dentsu in widening Olympic probe

You might also like