Japan Wind Development threatened with stock delisting

Shares in Japanese wind power firm Japan Wind Development are today going untraded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange for the second day running after the firm faced delisting for failing to meet an audit deadline.

The company is unlikely to meet a 30 June deadline to file its earnings auditing report because it changed its auditor, it said in a filing after markets closed on Monday.

If it fails to submit the report within a month of the deadline, then the shares will be delisted, the Tokyo Stock Exchange said in a statement the same day.

Japan Wind dismissed the auditor after it rejected the findings of an internal investigation, according to the filing.

The firm had set up a committee of outside experts to look into three memoranda an employee wrote to clients without the company's approval, according to reports from the Bloomberg news agency.

The committee found that the memos, in which the employee said that Japan Wind Development would supply turbines and batteries, were not legally-binding and did not pose inventory or procurement risks.

According to the statement from the firm, the auditor disagreed with the company's interpretation of the memoranda.

Japan Wind Development is the country's third-largest wind power generator and has recently looked to expand overseas with projects in Thailand, the UK and Germany.

The news comes as a Japanese government white paper said the nation needs to step up its use of renewables to secure a stable energy supply as global demand for energy continues to rise.

The paper said Japan's ratio of renewable energy to overall energy supply stood at around six per cent in 2007, but that this ratio needs to improve drastically if the nation is to hit emissions targets of a reduction in emissions of 15 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020.

The government wants wind to play a key part in reaching the targets, but developing wind farms is complicated because of the country's topography and the risk of extreme weather events, such as typhoons.

According to the Global Wind Energy Council, Japan's wind power capacity is currently 13th in the world at only 1.5GW of installed capacity.