Error Found in Basis for Land Discount to Moritomo

October 12, 2018

Tokyo- A builder of an elementary school that Moritomo Gakuen aimed to open admitted Thursday an error in a report that the land ministry regarded as a basis for a huge discount of state land sold to the private school operator.

The builder admitted the error in materials submitted to the House of Councillors Budget Committee. In response, opposition parties protested the 800-million-yen discount again, questioning its grounds.

In April 2016, Moritomo Gakuen submitted to the government the report, including photographs, that claimed that test drilling at eight locations on the land plot had found waste up to 3.8 meters below ground.

Based on the report, the government estimated the costs to dispose of buried waste at the site and set the amount of the discount. Moritomo Gakuen bought the land to build the planned school.

The opposition side had asked how deep the test drilling went, raising questions about a photo of the site showing a whiteboard on which "3 meters in depth" was written while the caption claimed a depth of four meters.

In the materials submitted to a meeting of senior committee members, the builder said that an inexperienced worker may have mistakenly written "3 meters" on the whiteboard.

It's not clear whether the test drilling reached 4 meters deep or an unskilled worker mistakenly wrote 3 meters even though the drilling reached 4 meters, the builder said.

The opposition side urged the ministry to provide additional explanations. The ministry refused, saying it made an appropriate judgment on the discount.

After the meeting, senior committee member Takanori Kawai of the opposition Democratic Party for the People told reporters that there is no clear evidence that buried waste exists at a depth of more than 3 meters.

Separately, committee Chairman Genjiro Kaneko decided not to file a criminal complaint against former National Tax Agency Commissioner Nobuhisa Sagawa.

The opposition demands such a complaint, suspecting that Sagawa committed perjury earlier this year during his parliamentary testimony related to the land transaction. Jiji Press