Gov’t Admits Moritomo Papers Altered amid Scandal Involving Abe’s Wife

March 12, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's government admitted on Monday that the Ministry of Finance's internal documents related to the sale of a state land lot to private school operator Moritomo Gakuen at a deep discount were altered in or after late February 2017, when the controversial deal came to light.

The high-profile scandal involves Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife, Akie, who had once been appointed honorary principal of an elementary school that the nationalist school operator based in the western Japan city of Osaka planned to open on the site in question in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture.

At a meeting on Monday with Hiroshi Moriyama and Yoshinori Oguchi, the parliamentary affairs chiefs of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its ally Komeito, respectively, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasutoshi Nishimura said that alterations were made in 14 sets of related documents.

The government reported the matter to a board meeting of the Budget Committee of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of parliament, later in the day and will then give an explanation to the Financial Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber.

According to the government, the original documents included descriptions indicating that Yasunori Kagoike, then head of Moritomo, mentioned talks related to the land with the Akie Abe side. However, this part in the original documents was deleted later.

In the initial documents, Kagoike was quoted as saying to an official of the ministry's Kinki Local Finance Bureau in western Japan that Akie, who visited the site, told the Moritomo side, "The land plot is a good one, so please go ahead."

The government is still investigating who instructed the alterations.

After Akie was appointed to the honorary principal post in September 2015, Moritomo acquired the land plot in June 2016 for 134 million yen after a discount of some 800 million yen in what the MOF side has claimed was the cost for removing buried waste from the site.

In the original documents, created by the Kinki finance bureau, the land deal was called an "exceptional" case. But the description was not seen in papers disclosed to lawmakers after the revelation of the scandal.

Also deleted were descriptions on remarks supportive of the land sale to Moritomo by secretaries of former disaster management minister Yoshitada Konoike, former minister of economy, trade and industry Takeo Hiranuma, the late former internal affairs minister Kunio Hatoyama and former Upper House member Issei Kitagawa, according to informed sources. Jiji Press