Kobe Steel’s Chief to Step Down as It Discloses Wider Quality Problems By MAKIKO INOUE and HISAKO UENOMARCH 6, 2018 TOKYO — Kobe Steel said on Tuesday that its top executive would resign, after a falsified data scandal that shook Japan Inc. and led other manufacturers to come clean about their broken pledges to meet top quality standards. No deaths or injures have been blamed on the Kobe Steel products at the center of the data falsification scandal, which primarily involved employees saying incorrectly that products met the company’s own lofty safety claims. Kobe Steel disclosed that some of its executives had known about fake quality data for years — in at least one case, for decades — and blamed a companywide focus on profitability and weak corporate governance. After Kobe Steel admitted its quality lapses, Mitsubishi Materials, another major supplier to a number of major Japanese companies, said its workers had falsified inspection data on components that went into cars and planes. In the case of Kobe Steel, the fake data scandal appears to have been wider than it had originally said in October, when it first disclosed the problems. The United States Department of Justice has begun a review of the safety scandal, while Kobe Steel lost some international certifications that allowed it to sell products to certain customers.
