MOF Submits Records on Negotiations with Moritomo

May 23, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's Ministry of Finance submitted to parliament on Wednesday copies of original records on negotiations with school operator Moritomo Gakuen, which is at the center of favoritism allegations against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's administration.

The MOF also said it started discarding the records after the controversial huge discount sale of a state land plot to Moritomo Gakuen, once linked to Abe's wife, Akie, came to light in February last year.

The ministry began the move apparently in order to ensure the documents' consistency with remarks by then MOF senior official Nobuhisa Sagawa at the Diet, the country's parliament.

At parliamentary meetings last year, Sagawa, who was director-general of the ministry's Financial Bureau at the time, said that the records had been discarded under MOF rules.

"I'd like to apologize deeply for the explanations given (by Sagawa) in the Diet that turned out to be factually inaccurate," said Kazushige Tomiyama, deputy director-general of the bureau.

But he stopped short of disclosing further details, including who instructed the document disposal and how the papers were discarded.

He said the ministry will thoroughly investigate the matter and report results promptly.

The copies of the original records on negotiations with Moritomo, totaling some 950 pages, were submitted to the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the Diet, the country's parliament.

The copies were found in such places as private computers of MOF staff. Most of all original records have been restored, the ministry said, citing support from the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office.

At a Diet committee meeting Wednesday, Abe said it is wrong to discard documents in relation to remarks made at the Diet.

"It is regrettable that the Diet remarks (by Sagawa) were different from the facts," the prime minister added.

The MOF has admitted falsifying documents related to the June 2016 sale of the plot of state land in the city of Toyonaka in Osaka Prefecture to Moritomo Gakuen at a discount of some 800 million yen from its assessed value.

The school operator planned to use the land to open an elementary school, once naming Akie Abe as its honorary principal.

Also on Wednesday, the MOF confessed that it carried out the discarding of the negotiation records at the same time as the document tampering.

In the tampering, the ministry removed or changed descriptions about the process of negotiations with Moritomo Gakuen and remarks containing the name of the prime minister's wife.

The submitted records show details of meetings between MOF officials and the representatives of Moritomo Gakuen.

According to the records, Saeko Tani, a government official then serving as assistant to Akie Abe, received an inquiry from a Moritomo Gakuen-related person and contacted the MOF's Financial Bureau twice in November 2015.

The records also showed interactions between the ministry and secretaries of five lawmakers who were lobbied by Moritomo Gakuen.

The five are former disaster management minister Yoshitada Konoike, former industry minister Takeo Hiranuma, the late former internal affairs minister Kunio Hatoyama, former state minister of land Issei Kitagawa and House of Councillors lawmaker Takuji Yanagimoto.

Also on Wednesday, the MOF submitted some 3,000 pages of original documents related to the land transaction with Moritomo. Jiji Press