LDP, DP agree to hold intensive Diet talks on Moritomo Mon.

March 15, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the opposition Democratic Party agreed Thursday to hold a House of Councillors Budget Committee meeting on Monday for intensive deliberations on the recently revealed manipulation of Ministry of Finance documents related to the high-profile Moritomo Gakuen scandal.

The LDP and the DP are still working on an opposition demand that former MOF official Nobuhisa Sagawa, a key figure in the government favoritism scandal involving the nationalist school operator, be summoned to the Diet, Japan's parliament, for possible sworn testimony on the alteration of the documents related to the controversial sale of a state land lot to Moritomo at a huge discount in 2016.

"The first thing to do is hold Diet deliberations," Masakazu Sekiguchi, the LDP's Upper House affairs chief, said at a meeting with his DP counterpart on Thursday, stopping short of making a clear response to the opposition demand.

While the ministry admitted the document manipulation earlier this week, the DP and other opposition parties have been refusing to join Diet proceedings, emphasizing the need to unravel the truth behind the Moritomo scandal.

At a meeting of their Diet affairs chiefs also on Thursday, the DP, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and four other opposition parties basically agreed to come back to Diet proceedings on Friday, following the LDP-DP agreement.

Meanwhile, the opposition side continues to demand parliamentary testimony by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife, Akie, whose name was deleted from the Moritomo papers as part of the tampering.

At a press conference on Thursday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga sounded negative about the summoning of Akie Abe. "The documents don't show she was involved in some way," the top government spokesman said.

Sagawa was head of the MOF Financial Bureau when the documents were tampered.

Akie Abe was once named honorary principal of an elementary school that Moritomo planned to establish on the land plot in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, western Japan. Moritomo withdrew the school plan after coming under fire over the land sale.

Also on Thursday, LDP Diet affairs chief Hiroshi Moriyama told Kiyomi Tsujimoro, his counterpart from the CDPJ, of the ruling bloc's plan to hold votes, including on the government's nominations for the Bank of Japan's governor and two deputy governors, at a plenary meeting of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, on Friday.

Moriyama then called for the opposition side's cooperation with the voting plan. Jiji Press