MOF emphasizes Sagawa’s role in Moritomo paper falsification

March 26, 2018

Tokyo- Mitsuru Ota, director-general of the Ministry of Finance's Financial Bureau, said Monday that Nobuhisa Sagawa, then chief of the bureau, was among officials that instructed alterations in documents on the dubious state land transaction with private school operator Moritomo Gakuen in 2016.

The changes "were made at the direction of part of financial bureau officials," Ota said during a House of Councillors Budget Committee meeting. "I recognize that he (Sagawa) is one such official," he said in response to a question from Keizo Takemi of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

To a question from Shinkun Haku, a member of the opposition Democratic Party, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded that those documents were "falsified," not merely "altered" as explained by the ministry.

Meanwhile, Abe denied anew a role of his wife, Akie, in the sale of the land plot in Osaka Prefecture with a huge discount to the nationalist school operator, with which she had a link.

"My wife and I were never involved in the land sale or approval" for an elementary school that Moritomo planned to build at the site in question, Abe told Teruhiko Mashiko of the DP.

Mashiko demanded that Akie be summoned to testify as a sworn witness before parliament, claiming that the document manipulation would not have been made if she had not been involved.

He also requested the summoning of Takaya Imai, Abe's secretary for political affairs, in a bid to find out whether there was any involvement by the prime minister's office.

Replying to a question from Ichita Yamamoto of the LDP, MOF Deputy Vice Minister Koji Yano denied that Finance Minister Taro Aso played part in the document fabrication.

When Aso was briefed by ministry officials on March 11 that changes had been made to the documents after they were officially adopted by the ministry, he responded by saying, "You'd done this," Yano recalled.

"He (Aso) had not known about the alterations up until then," Yano said, stressing that the manipulation was carried out at the working level.

Asked by Kotaro Tatsumi of the Japanese Communist Party if there was any instruction by the prime minister's office regarding the document tampering, Yano said no evidence has been detected.

As for opposition calls for setting up a special investigative committee on the issue, Abe said, "Everything that is needed to discover the facts must be done." Jiji Press