Tokyo, 19 April, /AJMEDIA
A Japanese high court on Monday found the head of a nationalist school operator and his wife, who were at the center of a cronyism scandal linked to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, guilty of fraud charges related to public subsidies for construction of an elementary school.
The Osaka High Court upheld a lower court decision that handed down a five-year prison term to Yasunori Kagoike, who assumed his post as chief of Moritomo Gakuen in March this year after stepping down in 2017. His wife Junko, meanwhile, was sentenced to two years and six months in prison.
In February 2020, the Osaka District Court ruled that 69-year-old Kagoike and his wife, 65, illegally received 56.44 million yen ($445,000) in central government subsidies between March 2016 and February 2017 by overcharging for the construction of an elementary school in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, on land purchased from the government.
The two were also indicted for unlawfully receiving around 120 million yen in subsidies from the prefecture and the city of Osaka between 2011 and 2017 by inflating the number of teachers at their preschool, though Junko Kagoike was found not guilty on this indictment.
Both prosecutors and defendants have appealed the ruling, with the couple having pleaded not guilty.
The couple was arrested in July 2017 after Moritomo Gakuen was revealed to have purchased the land in Toyonaka the previous year for 134 million yen, despite the land being valued at 956 million yen.
The heavily discounted sale of state-owned land to a private school operator with ties to Abe’s wife Akie sparked cronyism allegations after she, an acquaintance of the couple, was named honorary principal of the elementary school. She quit her post in the wake of the scandal.
In June 2018, the Finance Ministry punished 20 officials, including Nobuhisa Sagawa who led the ministry’s bureau in charge of the land sale, over the falsification and destruction of documents related to the land deal. But the prosecutors eventually did not indict Sagawa or other officials.
In March 2020, a month after the lower court ruling on the Kagoike couple, Masako Akagi, the wife of a former Finance Ministry bureaucrat, filed for damages against the government and Sagawa. She claimed her husband killed himself after being ordered to tamper with documents related to favoritism allegations against Abe.
