Japan's brash Livedoor tycoon heads to jail

Sporting a mohican haircut and a protest T-shirt, Japan's maverick Internet tycoon Takafumi Horie on Monday headed to a Tokyo jail to serve two-and-a-half-year sentence for accounting fraud. The flamboyant dotcom entrepreneur who shook up Japan Inc's often staid ways with his media-savvy persona and hostile takeover bids has long insisted he is a victim of the establishment. Horie, 38, was sentenced by the Tokyo district court in 2007 for falsely reporting a pre-tax profit of five billion yen ($61 million at today's rates) to hide losses at the Internet service provider. A high court appeal the following year was rejected, and the supreme court turned down the Livedoor founder again in April this year. Before heading to prison, Horie gave a news conference wearing a T-shirt with the words "Go to Jail" from the Monopoly board game, along with a list of failed big companies whose executives were not imprisoned. Surrounded by a swarm of supporters wearing the same T-shirt, and reporters, before setting out for the Tokyo high prosecutors' office to start his sentence, he said: "I want to reset my life." "I'm really sorry that I caused big trouble to Livedoor shareholders... As a penalty I'll serve my two-years-and-six-months sentence and come back." His incarceration is expected to be slightly shorter because he has already served 40 days in custody after his arrest. Livedoor Holdings was delisted in April 2006 in the wake of the accounting fraud scandal but has since recovered from the episode. Its current incarnation, LDH, is still embroiled in lawsuits filed by Livedoor shareholders seeking compensation for losses after its stock price plunged in the wake of the scandal. In a recent interview with the Asahi television network, Horie said he was trying not to think about what his life would be like in prison, saying only that "it doesn't seem fun". "What I can promise people is that I will lose weight" in jail, said the entrepreneur. The University of Tokyo literature dropout, who prefers T-shirts to business suits, became a household name with his start-up style that broke the rules of corporate Japan and made him a hero to many young people. He made headlines in 2004 when he attempted to take over Osaka's indebted Kintetsu Buffaloes baseball team. The following year he launched a rare hostile takeover bid for Nippon Broadcasting System from TV broadcaster Fuji Television, which failed but led Fuji to take a minority stake in Livedoor. Dating leading actresses and known to zoom around Tokyo in a Ferrari, his nickname was "Horiemon", a play on the name of popular blue robot cartoon cat "Doraemon".