Of escapism and other escapades: Playing Houdini-style hooky with the help of harmonics

What happened: Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn was accused of “significant acts of misconduct” in a whistleblower report earlier this year. Investigations found that Ghosn had under reported his compensation to the Tokyo Stock Exchange for close to $88 million over five years. Representative director Greg Kelly was also accused.

Status: Ghosn was responsible for the alliance between Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi, so all three companies have been hit. The action cost Ghosn the chairmanship of Nissan and Mitsubishi, but Renault is conducting an independent inquiry and is yet to take a decision. Ghosn was arrested on November 19 and continues to be in detention.

What happened: In March, it was reported that about 87 million Facebook profiles were harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a London-based political data analytics firm, in a massive data scandal. The whistleblower was Cambridge Analytica’s co-founder Christopher Wylie, who said that the data was used to create ‘psychographic’ profiles online and deliver pro-Trump material on the web. Zuckerberg was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in April.

Status: Last week, the parliamentary committee published a cache of Facebook internal documents, which contained some highly confidential documents and emails about how the social media giant treated user data. Zuckerberg responded by providing context to the emails so that there would be no misrepresentation.

What happened: Howard Wilkinson contacted Danske Bank’s senior management in Estonia with allegations of money laundering at the branch in 2014. Wilkinson worked with Danske’s trading unit in the Baltic region until 2014. Earlier this year, following reports of how CEO Borgen refused to scale back the Estonian non-resident business, Danske published its own report looking into the multi-billion dollar scandal. Last month, Wilkinson told the Danish Parliament that over $150 billion of the money from the scandal passed through Danske’s US subsidiary Deutsche Bank.

Status: Andersen and Borgen have stepped down from their respective roles of chairman and CEO.

What happened: Staley, who became the Barclays chief executive in 2015, was involved in a whistleblower scandal, beginning in 2016, as he tried to find out the identity of an anonymous employee who wrote a letter protesting a senior hire. The two British regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority and Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority, began looking into Stanley’s attempts to disclose the letter writer’s identity.

Status: The awkward chapter finally drew to a close with Staley being fined an undisclosed amount of money. No action was taken against Barclays itself.