Daewoo founder and Enron chief have much in common

The meltdown of the South Korean car manufacturing giant is still the world's biggest accounting fraud despite the recent revelations regarding Enron and WorldCom

Long before most Americans had ever heard of Enron and years before WorldCom and Global Crossing went bankrupt, there was Daewoo. The South Korean giant's meltdown in the late 1990s is still the world's biggest accounting fraud. The Daewoo fiasco was back in the news after Korea's best-known fugitive, Kim Woo Choong, gave an interview to Fortune magazine. Daewoo's 66-year-old founder fled Seoul in 1999 as his empire collapsed under $80bn of debt. He was accused of inflating assets by $30bn and embezzling $2bn. After nearly four years of jet setting around the world and avoiding extradit...