Sony Re-Writes The Books

Sony Corporation have been fined $1 million for "obscuring" losses from its motion picture divisions in 1994 by the US government. The fine was for failing to disclose the losses on films such as The Last Action Hero and Geronimo, which would have pushed the overall results of the company into the red. It also hid its film-unit losses under a broad category of "entertainment" that included its successful music division. In its 1994 annual report, the company made no mention of the fact that Sony Pictures Entertainment had sustained a net loss of $448 million that year and that the division's two film studios had accumulated losses of more than $1 billion since Sony acquired them five years earlier. Sony do not intend to contest the fine.