Senior executives at the Tokyo Stock Exchange are to get
temporary pay cuts of between 10% and 50%, following a systems
failure that shut down Tokyo trading for four-and-a-half hours on 1
November.
Despite the regular occurrence of IT system crashes in business,
this is believed to be the first time that those deemed to be
responsible for an IT problem have been given publicly announced
pay cuts.
Takuo Tsurushima, president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, will
see his pay cut in half for six months.
Sadao Yoshino, chief financial officer and senior managing
director, and Tomio Amano, managing director of the exchange, with
responsibility for the IT system, will both lose 30% of their pay
for six months. In addition, another five staffers are to lose
pay.
The outage was the most serious trading systems failure to have
hit the electronic exchange since it migrated from on-floor
trading, and resulted in billions of pounds-worth of lost
trades.
The outage was blamed on a software upgrade from Fujitsu which
supplies the Tokyo trading system. A bug in the software, installed
the previous day, was not discovered until trading was about to
start.
Fujitsu said it was also considering whether the directors on
its board would be taking a collective pay cut. It is believed
Fujitsu had provided the wrong installation instructions for the
software upgrade.
The US Nasdaq trading system suffered a system problem earlier
this year, but that only lasted a number of minutes. Millions of
dollars in trades were lost, however.