EXCLUSIVE: Hyogo Police Execs Punished over Favors from Contractor

Tokyo, Dec. 24 (Jiji Press)–Hyogo prefectural police executives have been punished over gifts and other favors from a company commissioned to provide services to the western Japan police, Jiji Press learned Wednesday. A police station chief received gifts from the company, while others, including former Hyogo police chief Toshiyuki Murai, 58, were wined by the company, sources said. The chief of a police station in western Hyogo, a 60-year-old superintendent, was close to a foreign national involved in business operations related to police. From around 2023, the chief is believed to have received benefits worth tens of thousands of yen in total, such as souvenirs and taxi fare money, on occasions including when he dined at a barbecue restaurant in Kobe, Hyogo’s capital, run by the foreign national. Murai, who resigned from police Wednesday, was among the police executives who gathered to dine at the restaurant several times and were served rare alcoholic beverages not on the menu for free. The foreign national’s company was contracted to manage a restaurant at the Hyogo police headquarters, find illegally parked cars and provide other services. Police authorities suspected that the provision of alcohol and other favors might have been in return for the awarding of contracts, but they found nothing unnatural in the process by which the company won those jobs through competitive bidding, the sources said. The executives other than the police station chief received only small amounts of benefits, ranging from several hundred to several thousand yen per person, and therefore the benefits are not considered to constitute illegal entertainment, the sources also said. But the athorities police decided to punish the executives related to such tenders because the foreign national was an interested party for the Hyogo police and the executives had supervisory responsibility. Of them, Murai received a caution from the commissioner-general of the National Police Agency. The police station chief has no authority over such bidding. But, considering that he damaged the Hyogo police’s credibility by receiving the large amount of benefits, he was given a stronger warning than others. Murai served as Hyogo police chief for two years from March 2023 before being appointed head of the agency’s Chugoku-Shikoku regional arm. The agency announced that he would resign on Sept. 8 this year, but the announcement was retracted soon after for probes into the scandal. “There are concerns about lax discipline throughout the organization,” a senior agency official said. In the first half through June, 154 police officers and workers were disciplined across the country, the highest number in the past decade, according to agency data. Hyogo topped the list of such disciplinary cases by prefectural police, with 20 people. As of Monday, the tally since January had reached 48. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]