On March 10th, Tokyo District Court broke into a flat of ex-Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie, a fallen IT entrepreneur star whose arrest caused so-called “Livedoor Shock” in 2006, distrain upon his golf bag, wine cellar appliance, television and shamisen(Japanese guiter) by valued them as 330,000 yen ($3646) in total.
Horie is appealing his alleged securities fraud to the higher court. After bailed out, he publicly said that he won’t get back to web business, and rather chase his space development business. He moved his popular blog to Ameblo blog hosting, which is run by his close ally Susumu Fujita’s CyberAgent. He also gets huge number of twitter followers, and is writing some articles on magazines.
Blog, Twitter and recently started paid newsletter are frequently updated with thoughts, including politics and his court case. Probably because of disbelief to mass media who bashed him, he has been building up those direct channels. Although English Wikipedia on Horie seems to stop update for years, he still keeps influences on Japanese websphere.
On his blog, he wrote that those irreconcilable plaintiffs (1700 of 3300, Mainichi reports), who can get money by reconciling from Livedoor Holdings, to whom Horie had agreed to pay 20.8 billion yen($230 million), are just harassing him by law abuse.
He pointed out that the plaintiffs thinks he lives in luxury, as this time’s claims 8 million yen shows, which image is manipulated by mass media. However, it turned out that 330,000 yen seizure unexpectedly revealed his simple lifestyle.
He also wrote that his recently purchased Shamisen, which was evaluated as 100,000 yen ($1000) by bailiff, was just 19,800 yen, by showing link to an online shop.
Livedoor Shock, which directly lowered whole stock market and Livedoor’s stock price, discouraged IT entrepreneurship (which was already far weaker than the one in US) a lot in Japan, which is blamed by both pro- and anti-Horie.
See Also:
Tokyo Broadcasting System Television(TBS)’s movie report by taking Horie’s back from lunch without knowing his flat was intruded [J] – The TV station Horie tried to take over in 2005 was Fuji TV, TBS is the one escaped from Rakuten takeover. It is not unknown yet how TBS became to knew this happened.
