Michael Woodford glances out of the floor-to-ceiling window of his multimillion-pound loft apartment, which looks out across the River Thames toward the City of London, the so-called Square Mile that is among the world's leading financial and commercial centers.
The 52-year-old Briton has effectively been jobless since being ousted for the part he played in Japan's own Enron scandal, when he blew the whistle last autumn on a 13-year, ¥130-billion accounting fraud at Olympus Corp., the global company he was running at the time.
Woodford, who was already president, had been appointed chief executive officer only two weeks earlier — groomed after 30 years, most of which had been spent in Europe, at the maker of cameras and endoscopes. "I'd proved in America and Europe that I understood the business. I wasn't a bureaucrat. I'd proven that I could realize the potential of Olympus," he says emphatically.