Japan Airlines Corp. shareholders Tuesday slammed the carrier's top executives, saying they had deceived them by issuing new shares last July without consulting them at their 2006 meeting and for failing to restore profitability in the last business year.
Speaking to a record 4,219 investors at the annual shareholders' meeting in Tokyo, JAL President Haruka Nishimatsu apologized for having kept them in the dark about the 148.5 billion yen stock issue but asked them to accept that the move was unavoidable in trying to turn the carrier around.
Besides diluting the value of the shares of existing investors and causing JAL stock to plummet, the public stock offering last summer drew especially harsh criticism because it came just two days after the shareholders' meeting.