http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-09/olympus-sued-for-273-million-after-13-year-fraud
The link I post above is a business news which basically talks about that Olympus Corp, a company whose Japanese camera and endoscope makes over a 13-year accounting fraud was sued by six banks for a total of 27.9 billion yen ($273 million) in damages, which is the largest amount among civil lawsuits filed.
As far as I‘m concerned,the behavior Olympus Crop did is obviously a kind of commercial fraud, which is totally violation of business ethic. However, in my opinion, creating and sustaining an ethical corporation isn’t as difficult as you might think. It’s actually easier than some of the day-to-day business challenges you face. The keys to running an ethical company are accountability, honesty, and information transparency. It simply requires that you follow your best moral instincts, even in areas that don’t appear to involve moral issues, such as cost-benefit analyses. But while good ethics often equates to good business, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes being truly ethical means giving up something you want in exchange for doing the right thing. That’s why we worry about ethics in the first place–if it didn’t cost us anything, everyone would be ethical all the time.
So, in this way, companies should consciously follow moral principles when they conduct business, because their decisions can affect society, and they have responsibility to their customers, employees, stockholders and creditors, etc. That refers to operate in an ethical manner is essential to company success.