Ex-aide to Abe likely to admit meeting with Kake official

May 2, 2018

Tokyo- Tadao Yanase, a key government official in a favoritism scandal, is expected to admit that he did meet with an official of the school operator at the center of the scandal over a planned veterinary medicine faculty, ruling party sources said Wednesday.

Yanase, former executive secretary to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, needs to modify his previous explanations in the wake of the discovery of a series of documents suggesting that he held talks with the official of Kake Educational Institution at the prime minister's office, the sources said. The school operator is headed by a friend of Abe.

Yanase, now vice minister for international affairs at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, is expected to appear in parliament to explain his meeting with the Kake official, according to the sources.

The ruling and opposition parties are discussing a plan to summon Yanase to parliament.

As a variety of documents on the meeting in question have been discovered, Yanase should first admit that he actually attended the gathering, a senior official of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party said.

Last month, the Kake group opened a university faculty of veterinary medicine in a national strategic special zone for deregulation in Imabari in the western Japan prefecture of Ehime, the first such university department to be established in Japan in 52 years.

On April 10, the Ehime prefectural government said it had discovered a memo about the meeting between Yanase and officials of the prefectural government and the Imabari municipal government. The prefectural government said that the memo was created by one of its personnel.

In the memo, Yanase was quoted as saying in the meeting on April 2, 2015, that the plan to establish the veterinary school was "a matter related to the prime minister."

Similar documents were found later at the agriculture ministry. Furthermore, an email sent from the Cabinet Office, which oversees national strategic special zones, to the education ministry referred to the meeting schedule.

In a statement released on April 10, Yanase said he had no memory of meeting with Ehime or Imabari government officials on the veterinary school issue. He also denied that he referred to the subject as the prime minister's matter.

According to another senior LDP official, Yanase now plans to explain that he was not aware of the presence of the local government officials in the meeting as they stood behind the Kake official.

Even if Yanase admits the meeting with a Kake official, that would not necessary mean he lied about the meeting in the past, the LDP official said. Jiji Press