Akai Electric Co., Ltd
Tokyo, Japan

Akai Electric Company Ltd. is mostly known as a manufacturer of tape recorders under the Akai and Roberts brands.

Akai was founded by Masukichi Akai and his son, Saburo Akai (who died in 1973) as Akai Electric Company Ltd. (赤井電機株式会社 Akai Denki Kabushiki-gaisha), a Japanese manufacturer in 1929 or 1946. At its peak in the late 1990s, Akai Holdings employed 100,000 workers and had annual sales of HK$40 billion (US$5.2 billion), but it collapsed in 2000 owing creditors US$1.1B. It emerged that ownership of Akai Holdings had somehow passed in 1999 to Grande Holdings, a company founded by Akai's chairman James Ting. The liquidators claimed that Ting had stolen over US$800m from the company with the assistance of accountants Ernst & Young who had tampered with audit documents going back to 1994. Ting was imprisoned for false accounting in 2005,and E&Y paid $200m to settle the negligence case out of court in September 2009. In a separate lawsuit, a former E&Y partner, Cristopher Ho, made a "substantial payment" to Akai creditors in his role as chairman of Grande Holdings.
[Source: Wikipedia]