Virender Sehwag's wife files complaint against business partners, accuses them of forgery

The Houston-based energy company clocked $100 billion in reported revenue in 2000, only to face bankruptcy and liquidation the following year. In 2001, it was discovered Enron had been inflating earnings figures and using accounting loopholes to conceal billions of dollars in bad loans. The scandal wiped off $74 billion from the company’s valuation. The SEC found that the company’s CEO, Jeff Skillings, and his predecessor, Ken Lay had pressured the auditing firm, Arthur Andersen, to overlook the discrepancies.

1Malaysia Development Bhd, envisaged as an investment vehicle to transform Malaysia into a financial hub, was instituted in 2008. The brainchild of former prime minister Najib Razak, the fund now owes investors and bondholders around $11 billion. Subsequent investigations pieced together a paper trail, linking public funds to the private bank account of Razak. He stands accused of siphoning $700 million. The Securities Commission of Malaysia said that auditors KPMG and Deloitte should be held accountable — irrespective of their being guilty of negligence or collusion.

The year was 1997. Xerox, the supplier of desktop publishing solutions, was flourishing. Afraid of being rendered obsolete by changing technology, the company inflated its sales numbers to show robust fundamentals. The revenue was overstated by $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion. The company’s stock prices soared to as much as $60 by 1999. The scam finally came to light, causing the stock to tank to $5 per share. The SEC deemed that Xerox’s auditor, KPMG, was party to the fraud, whereby revenue was overstated to cause a rally in share prices and enrich top executives.

Satyam was an IT services company based out of Hyderabad. In 2009, it was found that the company had overstated its revenue by $1.5 billion, making it one of the largest accounting scandals in India. B Ramalinga Raju, Satyam’s founder and chairman, admitted to falsifying records. Raju and his brother were charged with breach of trust. The Indian arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was fined by the US SEC for not raising the red flag. In 2018, SEBI banned PwC from auditing publicly listed companies in India after it was found that its auditors were complicit with the management of Satyam.

On July 21, 2015, Toshiba’s then CEO Hisao Tanaka resigned after an independent report revealed that the company had falsified earnings reports for the past seven years. Two previous CEOs were also indicted in the scandal. Toshiba had reported higher operating profits amounting to $1.2 billion. EY’s Japanese affiliate, Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC, was fined $17.4 million and debarred from taking on new business for three months.