BRANDS
Akai was founded by Masukichi Akai and his son, Saburo Akai (who died in 1973[1]) as Akai Electric Company Ltd. (赤井電機株式会社? Akai Denki Kabushiki-gaisha), a Japanese manufacturer in 1929 or 1946.[note 1] At its peak in the late 1990s, Akai Holdings employed 100,000 workers and had annual sales of HK$40 billion (US$5.2 billion), but it collapsed in 2000 owing creditors US$1.1B. It emerged that ownership of Akai Holdings had somehow passed in 1999 to Grande Holdings, a company founded by Akai's chairman James Ting. The liquidators claimed that Ting had stolen over US$800m from the company with the assistance of accountants Ernst & Young who had tampered with audit documents going back to 1994. Ting was imprisoned for false accounting in 2005, and E&Y paid $200m to settle the negligence case out of court in September 2009. In a separate lawsuit, a former E&Y partner, Christopher Ho, made a "substantial payment" to Akai creditors in his role as chairman of Grande Holdings.