IT TOOK a while. But this week Olympus attempted to answer a question that has been making investors jumpier than a man with a scorpion in his trousers. Why did the Japanese camera maker shell out $1.3 billion in deals that had little to do with its core business and seemed unlikely ever to make a decent return?Olympus paid a $687m advisory fee relating to its purchase of Gyrus, a British medical-devices firm, in 2008. The fee was more than 30% of the purchase price, when 1% would have been more normal. It went to a firm in the Cayman Islands and another in New York; both are now defunct. Olympus also paid $773m for three unprofitable firms (a cosmetics company, a maker of plastic containers and a waste-disposal business). It wrote off 76% of their value within a year.Why did Olympus’s managers approve such unusual payments? On November 8th the company confessed that the deals were designed to hide losses on securities dating back to the 1990s. Olympus’s new president, Shuichi Takayama, said that three Olympus executives were implicated. Yet only one, Hisashi Mori, a vice-president, was dismissed by the board. (He chose to remain as a director.) As for the other two, Olympus said that the corporate auditor, Hideo Yamada, “expressed his intention to offer his resignation”, whatever that means. The other, Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, resigned as chairman after the scandal broke. But he...