Nomura Asset Management Co Ltd likes to sell itself as a sober guardian of other people’s money. In reality it sits on top of a crime scene with a Bloomberg terminal.

They are the asset arm of Japan’s biggest brokerage, parked inside Nomura Holdings and sitting on hundreds of billions in client cash. Pensioners, teachers, savers, widows, the usual conveyor belt of people told to “trust the experts”. Behind the brochures and ESG waffle is a house that keeps catching fire, sometimes literally.

Now those same hands are wrapped round Cummins Inc, the diesel giant still wiping defeat device soot off its face. Nomura Asset Management owns about 133,725 Cummins shares, roughly 0.10 per cent of the company, worth tens of millions of dollars. A neat little slice of an engine maker that cheated on emissions, backed by a fund group that cheats on everything else.

You could not script a better match if you tried.

The Cummins Stake: Exhaust Money From A Dirty Wallet

Nomura Asset Management did not stumble into Cummins by accident. They increased the position, up nearly 10 per cent in the last reported quarter, to 133,725 shares. That is real exposure, not some token rounding error.

On paper it is a sensible industrial play. In reality it is a shareholder handshake between two firms with long memories of regulators, lawyers and settlements. Cummins only recently signed its name under a 1.675 billion dollar deal with US authorities over defeat devices, after years of spewing more real pollution than the paperwork claimed. Nomura’s parent group, meanwhile, has been busy poisoning trust in financial markets.

So when Nomura talks to its clients about “sustainable value” while parking their money in Cummins, what they really mean is pollution plus scandal plus yield equals everyone gets paid, apart from the public.

For the average punter looking down a factsheet, Nomura is just “another respectable institution” sitting on “quality US industrials”. The small print does not tell you that your Cummins exposure is being chaperoned by a shop where wealth managers get arrested for arson and traders get done for rigging government bonds for pocket change.

Wealth Management From Hell: Drug The Clients, Torch The House

You know a firm has lost the plot when its biggest risk factor walks on two legs.

In 2024 a former Nomura wealth management employee was arrested in Hiroshima. The charges read like a crime drama: robbery, arson, attempted murder. The allegation is brutally simple. He visited an elderly couple at home, drugged them, stole their cash, then set the house on fire with them still in it.

This was not some random burglar. He turned up with the Nomura name on his card, the trusted bank adviser at the door. The sales pitch ended with a burning house and two pensioners in hospital.

Nomura’s president, Kentaro Okuda, did the ritual bow, sliced 30 per cent off his own pay for a few months, and promised more controls. Ethics training, supervision, “learning lessons”. The usual corporate incense burned over the smell of petrol.

Then, as if to prove the rot was not confined to one man, another ex-employee, Yuta Cho, was arrested in early 2025 for defrauding an elderly client with a fake investment scheme. Different crime, same pattern: weaponise the logo, drain the victim, vanish.

This is the culture that sits above Nomura Asset Management. These are the human filters between grandma’s savings and the Cummins stake.

Spoofing The Bond Market: Crime For The Price Of A Used Kia

If the doorstep crimes show contempt for clients, the bond scandal shows contempt for the market itself.

In 2024 Japan’s watchdog nailed Nomura for manipulating Japanese government bond futures. A dealer played the old spoofing trick: fake size on the order book, push prices where you want them, cancel before anyone can hit you, skim the difference. It was not even for serious money, roughly the cost of a second-hand car, but the damage was enormous.

The fine landed. Big domestic clients froze business. Nomura was quietly cut from underwriting roles by blue chips who did not fancy standing next to a live grenade at their bond launch.

Inside the Nomura complex the official line was “one trader, one bad episode”. Outside, everyone could see what it really was: a shop where controls were weak, incentives were skewed, and management only found the brakes after the regulator slammed into the bonnet.

You do not get to spoof sovereign bond futures then claim the asset management arm operates on another moral planet. The same culture prices your funds, builds your fixed income positions, and signs off your Cummins stake.

India: Inflated Profits And The Vanishing Fixed-Income Boss

Roll forward to 2025 and the spotlight swings to India. Nomura’s local fixed-income unit suddenly reports losses after a period of suspiciously shiny results. Bloomberg reports an internal probe into whether profits were padded by playing games with the valuation of STRIPS, those sliced bond instruments that are a playground for creative accounting.

Within days, the head of fixed income in India, Ujjwal Kumar, resigns. Officially there is “no compliance investigation”, unofficially everyone can smell the panic.

You do not need to understand STRIPS to get the point. If you overvalue the stuff you hold, your “trading genius” is just a spreadsheet lie. That lie feeds into performance figures. Those figures are waved under client noses. And somewhere in that chain, an asset management product with Nomura on the label is sold as “strong performing fixed income”.

Again, Cummins is just one line item in a wider book, but it is being held inside an organisation that cannot stop tripping over its own shadows. When the numbers look too pretty, TCAP has learned to ask what is hiding in the footnotes. Nomura’s India story fits the old pattern a little too well.

Long Memory Of Dirt: From Sokaiya To Archegos

Nomura’s present ugliness sits on top of a very long pile.

In the late nineties they were caught paying sokaiya, gangster-adjacent racketeers, to keep shareholder meetings tidy. In the early 2010s, sales staff leaked inside information on share issues so favoured funds could front-run the market. They were fined. Executives resigned. Everyone promised a new chapter.

Then came Archegos. Nomura was one of the prime brokers shovelling leverage at Bill Hwang’s family office until the tower collapsed in 2021. The hit was around 2.9 billion dollars. Whole chunks of their prime brokerage business in the US and Europe were shut or scaled back. The lesson was obvious – they did not understand their own risk, or, worse, they understood it and took it anyway.

Add in a volatility product blow-up that wiped retail investors in 2018, US fines for mis-marking shorts and sloppy supervision, and a fresh New York Stock Exchange charge in 2025 over bad options books, and you do not have a “few bumps in the road”. You have a business model where compliance is always trying to catch up with sales.

Nomura Asset Management sits inside that history like a clean shirt on a filthy body. The branding is calm. The track record is carnage.

Why This Matters For Cummins

This is not just about one grubby Japanese financial group. It is about the ecosystem that keeps Cummins funded and comfortable.

Cummins wants you to see its investor base as boring and respectable. Pension funds. Asset managers. Anchor institutions. The sort of people who would not dream of cutting corners.

Look a little closer and you find shareholders like Nomura Asset Management, with:

Ex-staff on trial for attempted murder of clients
Regulators chasing them for bond market manipulation
Internal probes into inflated profits
A decades-long back catalogue of insider deals and gangster payoffs

Together they form a circle round Cummins, collecting dividends from a company that cheated emissions tests while their own house is on fire.

The Cummins story is not just diesel and data centres. It is the money behind it. And when that money is shepherded by firms like Nomura Asset Management, anyone who still says “long-term responsible investor” with a straight face deserves whatever smoke they choke on.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Shareholder Spotlight : Nomura Asset Management – Attempted Murder, Market Tricks And A Stake In Cummins