LDP rejects demand to summon Abe’s wife over Moritomo scandal

March 13, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Tuesday rejected a renewed opposition demand to summon Akie Abe and a key former bureaucrat for sworn parliamentary testimony about a government favoritism scandal involving school operator Moritomo Gakuen, once linked to the wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The development came a day after the government reported to the Diet, the country's parliament, that over 200 items in 14 sets of Finance Ministry documents on a state land plot that was leased, and then sold at a huge discount, to Moritomo were altered after the controversial land sale came to light in mid-February 2017.

The changes to the documents include the removal of the name of Akie Abe, who was once appointed honorary principal of an elementary school that Moritomo had planned to establish on the site in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, western Japan.

Moritomo gave up the school plan after coming under fire over the land deal.

Finance Minister Taro Aso said on Monday that Nobuhisa Sagawa, then chief of the ministry's Financial Bureau, had final responsibility for the document alteration.

On Tuesday, opposition parties boycotted a key Diet hearing on the government's fiscal 2018 draft budget, over the deepening Moritomo scandal.

LDP Diet affairs chief Hiroshi Moriyama, at a meeting with Kiyomi Tsujimoto, his counterpart from the major opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, said that it is "difficult" to summon Akie Abe and Sagawa as sworn witnesses at the Diet, as demanded by the opposition side.

Tsujimoto for her part spurned Moriyama's call for the opposition camp to come back to Diet deliberations.

The ruling bloc "may be taking the matter lightly," Tsujimoto said. She stressed that the opposition camp will not return to Diet proceedings unless the truth behind the document falsification is brought to light.

"This is a matter for which politicians should take blame," Tsujimoto said, urging Aso to resign as finance minister.

At a press conference on the day, Aso again denied that he will step down over the document fraud, saying, "Unraveling the cause of the document tampering and devising measures to prevent similar practice are my mission."

Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of Komeito, the coalition partner of the LDP, told a separate press conference that there may be an option to summon Sagawa to testify under oath before the Diet, if necessary.

But Yamaguchi noted that the summoning of Sagawa should be carefully considered as he is no longer a government official but a private citizen.

Sagawa resigned as commissioner of the National Tax Agency on Friday to take blame for the Diet's "confusion" over the Moritomo scandal.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga stressed the need for a thorough probe to uncover the whole truth of the Moritomo affair.

On the opposition demand for the summoning of Akie Abe and Sagawa to the Diet, however, the top government spokesman only said, "It's a matter to be decided by the Diet." Jiji Press