Kobe Steel Scandal Grows to Include Subsidiaries<br />TOKYO — A scandal about falsified quality data at Kobe Steel expanded on Friday, as the Japanese steel maker said nine subsidiaries,<br />including several outside Japan, had either failed to carry out required product checks or lied about the results.<br />Including products sold by the subsidiaries, Kobe Steel said it now estimated<br />that it had shipped substandard or potentially substandard materials to 500 customers, up from an initial estimate of 200.<br />Kobe Steel said that in some cases the tests had not been carried out, and<br />that in other cases employees had recorded fake results to make it seem as though the products met customers’ standards when they did not<br />“We are trying to understand how this could possibly happen at so many subsidiaries, including<br />overseas,” Kobe Steel’s chief executive, Hiroya Kawasaki, said at a news conference.<br />Mr. Kawasaki repeated a promise to complete in two weeks an investigation into potential safety hazards related to the data falsification,<br />and to deliver in a month the results of a broader examination of the company’s failings, which now look systemic and global.
