On April 5, a press conference was held at Iwatani by Akiji Makino, the president of the company, and Masao Nomura, a senior executive director who has been selected to take over as the new president.

At the start of the press conference, Makino noted, “With our new president, Mr.Nomura, I am anticipating what will be a breath of fresh air for our company, based on the new perspective he will bring.” He went on to say, “Last year we had the problem of penalties imposed on us for violation of the ant-trust law. The way I see it we need to strengthen our measures of dealing with this sort of thing with a complete system of internal control and compliance. It was with this point of view that Mr. Nomura was selected as he had worked his way through such administrative departments as personnel and corporate planning. We now have a setup whereby our new president Nomura will be handling how to implement this system, while as chairman and CEO I will be dealing with external matters and the Iwatani Group.”

Continuing right along, Nomura stated, “As the new president to be, right before the board of directors meeting on March 29 I was told by Mr. Makino that, ’You don’t have the option to refuse.’ I wondered whether I would be able to get by with my very limited abilities but the decision had been made. Ten days after the meeting of the board I again realized that I would be bearing corporate responsibility as head of 1,400 Iwatani employees, and of well over 10,000 if you include the employees of all of the other companies of the group.”