MOF Punishes Officials over Tampering of Moritomo Papers

June 4, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's Ministry of Finance announced punishments for a total of 20 former and incumbent officials involved in a high-profile document tampering scandal on Monday, slapping then Financial Bureau chief Nobuhisa Sagawa, believed to have led the misconduct, with a retirement benefit cut.

According to the MOF announcement, the retirement benefit cut for Sagawa is equivalent to three months' suspension from duty. At the ministry, suspension from duty is the second-heaviest disciplinary measure.

Sagawa no longer holds public office, after resigning as commissioner of the National Tax Agency in March to take the blame for confusion in the Diet, Japan's parliament, over the manipulation of documents related to a controversial state land sale to school operator Moritomo Gakuen.

The ministry will reduce 5.13 million yen from his retirement benefit of 49.99 million yen.

Among the other officials involved, Minoru Nakamura, director of the Planning and Administration Division of the Financial Bureau, will be suspended for one month.

Announcing the punishments at a press conference, Finance Minister Taro Aso said that "the (then) Financial Bureau chief gave a direction and the Planning and Administration Division head played a central role" in the document manipulation.

Aso said he will voluntarily return his compensation as a cabinet member for 12 months, or about 1.7 million yen, over the document manipulation, saying the misconduct eroded the people's trust in public administration as a whole.

Opposition lawmakers are demanding that Aso resign for the document manipulation, as well as a recent sexual harassment scandal involving the ministry's then top bureaucrat.

But Aso said, "I'm not thinking about resigning."

Also on Monday, the ministry submitted a report to the Diet on its investigation into the document fraud.

The Moritomo papers were altered after the land deal, under which a state-owned land plot in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, western Japan, had been sold to the nationalist school operator for 134 million yen, at a deep discount of some 800 million yen, came to light in February 2017.

The ministry has claimed that the alterations were carried out to make the documents consistent with Sagawa's explanations on the land deal before the Diet.

The falsifications include the deletion of parts mentioning Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife, Akie, once appointed honorary principal of an elementary school that Moritomo Gakuen planned to open at the Toyonaka site.

During the press conference, Aso stressed that the ministry's investigation did not confirm that the tampering was motivated by a sense of alarm over the references to the first lady.

Last week, the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office announced that it had decided not to indict Sagawa or other officials involved in the document tampering and the massive discount sale, due to inadequate evidence.Jiji Press