LENDING MILLIONS TO AN UNKNOWN MAN.

LENDING MILLIONS TO AN UNKNOWN MAN. Lehman Brothers is suing Marubeni, a Japanese trading company over a $353 million loan that Lehman claims was part of a fraudulent scheme. It appears that two contract employees of a Marubeni business unit used Marubeni conference rooms that they weren’t authorized to use to obtain the loans for a fictional business. An important part of the scheme was an impostor who passed himself off as a Marubeni general manager, Mr. Sato. The fraud was revealed when a repayment was not made, and Lehman had a meeting with the real Mr. Sato. A similar scam in the United States about twelve years ago involved a nonemployee of Philip Morris persuading eight banks to lend $350 million for a nonexistent project. It’s hard enough to imagine a confidence man obtaining huge loans for a nonexistent project, but for a confidence man to be able to pretend to be an executive of a company and to do it in a borrowed conference room—some people can act a part well.