MOF Seen Punishing Sagawa, Others over Document Tampering

May 20, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's Ministry of Finance is making arrangements to punish several former and current executives, including former National Tax Agency Commissioner Nobuhisa Sagawa, over document falsification linked to a controversial state land sale, according to informed sources.

The MOF will acknowledge that Sagawa, then director-general of its Financial Bureau, and other officials were involved in the document manipulation and consider slapping them with pay cuts, admonishments or other disciplinary actions, the sources said.

It is also expected to question the responsibility of Budget Bureau Director-General Shigeaki Okamoto, who as deputy vice minister was in charge of managing official documents at the ministry.

Minister of Finance Taro Aso has expressed his intention to punish officials who are found to have been involved in the document falsification, after checking the outcome of an investigation by the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office on the matter.

On Friday, Aso told a news conference that he wants to appoint the successors of Sagawa and former Vice Minister of Finance Junichi Fukuda, who resigned last month over sexual harassment allegations, "by the end of the ongoing (ordinary) session" of the Diet, Japan's parliament, on June 20 if the results of the prosecution's probe are available.

In February last year, it came to light that the MOF's Kinki Local Finance Bureau had sold at a huge discount a state land plot to school operator Moritomo Gakuen. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife, Akie, had once been appointed honorary principal of an elementary school that Moritomo planned to establish at the site.

Detailed records of land sale negotiations, Akie's name and other descriptions in documents related to the questionable land sale were deleted or manipulated between the February revelation and April in the same year.

At the request of opposition parties, the ministry is scheduled to submit the original documents before manipulation to the Diet on Wednesday.

On March 9, Sagawa resigned as head of the tax agency, mainly for disrupting parliamentary deliberations with his testimony on the document tampering. He also took a 20 pct pay cut for three months for undermining trust in state property administration.

Aso has indicated that the ministry could impose a stricter punishment on Sagawa, depending on the results of the prosecutors' investigation. Jiji Press