Tokyo Police Arrest Land Fraudsters; Sekisui House Loses Billions of Yen

October 16, 2018

Tokyo- Tokyo police arrested on Tuesday some members of a fraud group for allegedly attempting to register a land ownership change using fake documents, in a high-profile case that led Sekisui House Ltd.  to lose billions of yen.

Among the land swindler group members arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department was Masami Haketa, 63.

The MPD plans to arrest other members of the group as well. Of them, a man believed to be the group's leader has fled abroad, and the police will try to find his whereabouts by obtaining an arrest warrant, while aiming to uncover the whole picture of the case.

According to investigative sources, the group, around June last year, is suspected of having attempted to register a change in the ownership of a 2,000-square-meter land lot in the Nishigotanda district in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward by submitting forged documents to a local branch office of the Justice Ministry's Tokyo

Legal Affairs Bureau, with one of its members pretending to be the landlord of the site.

According to Sekisui House and other sources, the company came to know around March last year that the land in question was on sale. On April 24 the same year, the major house maker based in the western Japan city of Osaka concluded a contract to purchase the site with a woman who claimed to be its owner through a real estate company.

Sekisui House paid a total of some 6.3 billion yen for the land by June 1 last year and applied for the registration of a change in the land ownership to the company from the woman's side at the Shinagawa legal affairs office. But the application was rejected on June 9 as documents submitted by the woman's side were found to be forged.

Sekisui House ended up being unable to recover about 5.55 billion yen out of the total payment and filed a criminal complaint with the Tokyo police.

The company made the matter public in August last year. Jiji Press