Inside Asian Gaming

OCTOBER 2018 INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 23 The majority of my time was spent in Manila and my attention was completely on the Philippine project. While I was away, I believe people were taking advantage of the fact that I was not in Tokyo to be hands-on, to be looking at what’s going on in Tokyo. I suspect people behind my back started working on these intricate plans. What was particularly frustrating and angering about the 23 May directors’ meeting was that at that time, another director basically stated to me that “You can’t issue additional shares or ask for authority for issuance of additional shares at a directors’ meeting.” Now, I had run this company for over 50 years, I have attended many of these directors’ and shareholder meetings. I understand that there are these corporate protocols and other reports that are necessary, and the fact that you need a shareholders’ agreement for some large investments to take place. But it’s also normal to first take authority of the board and to bring that up as a matter to be agreed upon by the shareholders. But [this director] had the audacity to say, “No, chairman, you can’t do that, you can’t raise that in a board meeting. That can only be agreed to by the shareholders.” I believe what was going on was that [Jun] Fujimoto, at the time of the 23 May directors’ meeting, was already gathering his forces to start his move to push me out. It was also surprising that during that directors’ meeting, Fujimoto summoned a corporate internal auditor, [Nobuyoshi] Ichikura – not something that I could anticipate. He came up and started laying all these allegations of wrongdoing. He laid out many of these issues that, first of all, I had no knowledge of or expectation that they would even be discussed at this meeting. I believe the resulting release to the media [issued by Universal, announcing Okada’s suspension and investigation] was very biased and incomplete. What happened to my initial discussion of new shares? This auditor’s report was the only thing that was being discussed, not even taking into account [what] I had wanted to do regarding infusing additional funds into Universal. Of course I got frustrated. Here was this person that I had never met – I’m the founder, the chairman of this company and also a director – and this person comes into a directors’ meeting and starts laying down all these allegations. He would not listen to the initial board agenda – my agenda. So I increasingly got frustrated and raised my voice at him, too. But in the end, the happenings at the board meeting made their way to the media and the media painted me as an unreasonable, demanding person – not in the sense of trying to increase the available funds for Universal but as the person that was trying to grab more shares. I basically yelled at him and said, “Listen, you come here with allegations. Where’s the investigation? Has this been fully investigated? If you’ve done a full investigation, the result of that investigation is something you raise. But now you’re saying that there’s [only] a possibility of these actions taking place. This is not the time to just talk about things that may have taken place. You should have done the investigation first and then talked about it.” I basically scolded the board members, saying that it’s my first time hearing about these issues and allegations. I haven’t seen any supporting evidence that would even facilitate some of these allegations. And at that time Fujimoto banged the table and said, “I’m suspending your powers now.” I was utterly flabbergasted at the fact that he would state that he COVER STORY Kazuo Okada was ousted from the board of Wynn Resorts in 2012. could suspend my powers without basis. He didn’t have grounds for it. I’m bewildered to think that one can claim to have the power to suspend me based on unsubstantiated claims. So I said, “I can’t work with people like this, there’s no way I can stay with people like you, I’m going to have to fire all of you.” I said that and I left. I went back two days later to try to get my personal belongings from the office, but I was accosted by security officers and they prevented me from entering. MC: But Universal did do a full investigation and reported three cases of inappropriate transactions. What’s your response? KO: What was contained there is an absolute sham. My personal thought was, “How could someone write something like this? This is just terrible, how could anyone go so low as to try to do this?” And they started throwing out libel and slander in waves. MC: Why do you believe Universal shareholders, employees and stakeholders would be better off with you in charge as opposed to the current team? KO: Because I believe the current management only sees the short-