Hoshino Seen Becoming Japan’s Top Finance Bureaucrat

June 4, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's Finance Ministry is considering promoting Tsuguhiko Hoshino, 58, director-general of the ministry's Tax Bureau, to vice minister of finance, informed sources said Saturday.

The post has been vacant since Junichi Fukuda, 58, resigned as top finance ministry bureaucrat in April for sexual harassment of a female journalist.

The ministry also looks poised to appoint Atsushi Iizuka, 59, director-general of the Customs and Tariff Bureau, as commissioner of the National Tax Agency. This post, previously held by Nobuhisa Sagawa, 60, is also vacant.

The ministry plans to formalize the appointments after discussions with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's office, the sources said.

Sagawa resigned as the tax agency's head in March to take the blame for causing confusion at the Diet, the country's parliament, through his remarks related to the controversial discount sale of a state land plot to school operator Moritomo Gakuen.

The ministry is set to report on Monday results of its investigation into the ministry's falsification of documents related to the land deal with Moritomo Gakuen at the center of a favoritism scandal.

The results will be released after public prosecutors said Thursday that they have decided not to indict Sagawa or any other officials hit by criminal complaints over the land deal and the document falsification.

It was widely expected that Shigeaki Okamoto, 57, director-general of the Budget Bureau, would be promoted to vice minister.

He was eliminated from the list of candidates apparently because he was deputy vice minister and responsible for Diet affairs and document management at the time when ministry officials tampered with Moritomo-related documents, informed sources said. Jiji Press