Category: Nova

The former president of Nova Corp., once Japan’s biggest English-language school operator, was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to prison by the Osaka district court, the Asahi newspaper said. The court found today Nozomu Sahashi redirected 320 million yen ($3.4 million) from his employees’ welfare program to the company before its bankruptcy in 2007,…

In April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled the way the company calculated its cancellation policies was illegal and ordered Nova Corp. to repay about ¥310,000 to a Tokyo man who received no refund when he canceled his contract. Faced with mounting debts, Sahashi in July 2007 allegedly diverted nearly ¥320 million from an employment benefit…

According to the indictment, in July 2007, Sahashi conspired with a 50-year-old Nova executive in charge of finance to embezzle the reserve funds of a mutual aid organization for Nova Group employees chaired by Sahashi. The money was transferred to a bank account of an affiliate company. The prosecutors said that on the night before…

The founder of Japan’s failed language school chain Nova went on trial on Monday charged with embezzlement over a scandal that left thousands of foreign teachers without jobs. Nova, whose schools were once ubiquitous across Japanese cities, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2007 after the government ordered it to halt part of its operations over insufficient…

The former president of English conversation school operator Nova Corp. admitted to embezzling employment benefit funds shortly before the company went bankrupt at his first court hearing Monday at the Osaka District Court. But defense counsel for Nozomu Sahashi, 57, claimed his actions were in the interest of the employees and do not constitute the…

[Former Nova President Nozomu] Sahashi is under indictment on charges of embezzlement in the conduct of business for transferring 320 million yen from the account of the employees’ mutual assistance association into another account in July 2007, exchanging the money for a check and placing the funds in an affiliate’s account. A prosecutor said in…

An independent panel formed by court-entrusted citizens has ruled unjust last year’s decision by prosecutors not to slap criminal charges on the failed English conversation school operator Nova Corp. and its former president for failing to pay salaries to foreign instructors and employees, the panel said Tuesday. The decision was made by Osaka’s No. 2…

‘All the schools are closed.’ That’s the text message I received on the morning of Oct. 26, 2007, from a fellow Nova teacher. I went to my school later that day to find the lights off, the doors locked and no one around. Like most of Nova Corp.’s hundreds of language centers, it was never…

Even though it has been a year since Nova applied for court protection under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law, the central government has done little to ensure the private language school industry improves its operations. The failure of Nova, which was the largest language school in the nation, has sowed public distrust in the industry. Moreover,…