The president of Livedoor Co, the scandal-tainted Japanese Internet firm, apologised in court Friday for his company having tricked investors by concealing financial losses.
"Our management's attention used to be directed only at our stock price," said Kozo Hiramatsu, who was testifying on behalf of Livedoor at a Tokyo District Court hearing, Kyodo News reported.
"We are profoundly repentant that our company misled the market," added Hiramatsu, who was appointed Livedoor president in January after the arrest of the company's flamboyant founder Takafumi Horie.
Livedoor, one of its subsidiaries and four former Livedoor executives were charged in May for conspiring with Horie to falsely report some five billion yen (43 million dollars) in pretax profit for the year to September 2004 to hide actual losses of some 300 million yen at the company.
The two firms and the four former executives pleaded guilty to the charges. The trial of Horie, who has denied any wrong-doing, has not yet begun.
Hiramatsu described the 33-year-old Horie as a "young Japanese manager with excellent qualifications.
"I want him to learn lessons from this incident and become repentant, although this incident is very deplorable," he was quoted as saying by Kyodo.
News of the Livedoor probe in January sent the Tokyo stock market briefly into freefall, forcing Asia's largest bourse to close early for the first time ever as a flood of sell orders threatened to swamp the computer system.
Horie has been keeping a low profile since his release on bail, in stark contrast to the days when he was a regular on television quiz shows and the celebrity circuit, often with a model on his arm.
