Like Odysseus, who sailed the seas deceiving mermaids in order to find the way home,
corporate leaders too navigate the international business seas in constant search of new
sources of profit, whereby the old dilemma to ‘‘cheat or fail’’, with all the nice marketing
stories about ethics, is still as topical as ever. Yet the question that imposes itself is: what can
impel corporate leaders, who have made it to the top because they were successful, to get
into a whirl of activities that turns them into a text-book example of failure? Why do
accountants, as practitioners in a professional field whose image is based on credibility and
reliability, accept the role of accomplice in corporate misbehavior? One of my theses is that
frauds in the corporate environment after the fall of the Berlin Wall have to be investigated
through the similarity of models under which citizens are subjugated by means of financial
machination by the ruling political and economic elites.