Discarded Documents Were Discovered

Ministry of Finance, which dealt with national treasury, submitted a bunch of documents over negotiation with an educational corporation in Osaka, Moritomo Gakuen, on Friday. A series of 20 documents consisted of about 300 pages were what the high ranked officer of the Ministry had said as discarded. Discovery of discarded documents encourages the opposite parties in the Diet to accuse Shinzo Abe administration of its deep involvement in Moritomo Scandal.

The documents submitted by MoF were internal reports of Kinki Local Finance Bureau, which had been in charge of negotiation with Moritomo, over the selling off of government-owned land property made in between August 2013 and April 2015. They show how the bureau has answered to the request from Moritomo over legal procedures. The bureau considered making contract of land lease with condition of future selling out. There has been no such kind of contract among similar 1,200 cases in past five years.

KLFB made the contract of land lease in May 2015. “We received a request from the educational corporation that demanded 8 years of land lease and buying it thereafter,” described in a document disclosed. In the internal rule of MoF, a land lease based on future selling off must be expired within three years. The request from Moritomo was highly irregular one from the beginning. The officers in the bureau considered various measures including consecutive renewals of the three-year contract.

The documents also revealed financial problem of Moritomo, which indicated that the corporation would not be able to buy the land 8 years later. There also was a concern that Moritomo would not obtain license from the local government for opening new elementary school on the achieved land with insufficiency of management plan relying on donations. Receiving Moritomo’s hope for starting construction of the school in March 2015, the bureau made a fixed term land lease contract for within 10 years, which made an extremely rare case.

In the Diet discussions from last year, former Chief of MoF Financial Bureau, Mobuhisa Sagawa, has been telling that there had never been a negotiation with Moritomo, based on specific offer on the price of lease. But the discovered documents indicate that the bureau has told Moritomo a rough estimate of the price. Sagawa kept on disclosing the related documents, saying that they had been scrapped.

The existence of the documents and contradiction in them caused fundamental doubt on Sagawa lying about the negotiation. Chairwoman of Diet Affairs Committee of Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Kiyomi Tsujimoto, requested leading Liberal Democratic Party summoning witness of Sagawa. LDP is expected to dismiss the request to protect Abe administration. Moritomo Scandal has grown up to be the biggest issue in the first half of current session of the Diet.