The chaos at Toshiba, the Japanese corporate giant, deepened today with its chairman resigning and the company saying that it would book a $6.3 billion loss related to its U.S. nuclear business, the Washington Post reported. Analysts are now speculating about the possibility that Toshiba, which employs almost 200,000 people in Japan and has significant investments in the United States, will have to file for bankruptcy. Toshiba executives were due to deliver the company’s quarterly earnings announcement Tuesday — the deadline for the Tokyo Stock Exchange rule to report earnings within 45 days — but they failed to show up. Instead, the company said that it was “not ready” to make the announcement and asked for another month to file. Then, after the stock market had closed, Toshiba said that it would take a $6.3 billion hit related to Westinghouse’s acquisition in December of Stone & Webster, a nuclear construction business, from Chicago Bridge & Iron in December. Shigenori Shiga, its chairman, would step down tomorrow to take responsibility for the losses, the company said. Toshiba, which bought a majority stake in Pennsylvania-based nuclear power company Westinghouse in 2006, earlier said that it had received internal information late last month about irregularities during the acquisition. It had learned that controls at Westinghouse had been “insufficient” and that the company had used “inappropriate pressure” to make the acquisition.
