Marubeni and the Lockheed scandal — a “voyage without a chart” (1976)

The cost of a business propped up by political ties

At the heart of this affair is the moment when a trading house’s business model — one that tries to secure the rights to big-ticket goods through closeness to politics — crossed the line of the law and shook the company itself. For goods such as aircraft, which are costly and whose selection is entangled with politics, the distance between an agent’s trading rights and political maneuvering narrows easily. Marubeni stepped over that line, was placed at the centre of a bribery scandal, and lost management, credit and industry standing — tangible and intangible assets alike — all at once. It was at once the crime of individuals and an organizational problem: the trading customs that pushed them into it.

What the affair left behind was not only a monetary loss. Stripped of the capacity to sail by setting mid- and long-term hypotheses, Marubeni was left chasing immediate crises in a “voyage without a chart,” and that prolonged its stagnation. A failure of governance does not end with the one-off price of fines or damages; it erodes the very power of a company to conceive its future. Where to draw the line between winning trading rights and the bounds of law and ethics — the Lockheed scandal is an instructive case that long displayed, in Marubeni’s stagnation, the size of the price of crossing it.