Former Livedoor Co. President Takafumi Horie and four others, as well as the company itself, were charged Tuesday with falsifying the company's financial statements for the business year through September 2004.
They stand accused of inflating Livedoor's financial figures to make it appear the Internet services firm had a group pretax profit of 5 billion yen for the period when it actually had a pretax loss of some 300 million yen.
Prosecutors believe Horie played a leading role in padding the financial statement in an attempt to raise the value of Livedoor's stock.