Japan Finance Ministry Discloses Last Set of Moritomo Papers

Tokyo, April 14 (Jiji Press)–The Japanese Finance Ministry disclosed on Tuesday the seventh and likely final set of documents related to a document-tampering scandal linked to the dubious sale of state-owned land to school operator Moritomo Gakuen. The documents were disclosed to Masako Akagi, 55, whose husband Toshio, a former MOF regional official, committed suicide at the age of 54 after being ordered to tamper with official records related to the sale. Despite the latest batch being the last to be released, the documents did not include specific instructions from Nobuhisa Sagawa, former director-general of the ministry’s Financial Bureau, who is believed to have been behind the document falsification. The latest documents contained about 28,000 pages, including emails and reception records held by the Kinki Finance Bureau, where Toshio Akagi had worked. “I couldn’t know anything I wanted to know,” the widow told reporters after receiving the documents at the Finance Ministry in Tokyo. “It’s really frustrating.” The so-called Moritomo documents on the land sale to the school operator, once linked to the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife, Akie, were voluntarily submitted by the Finance Ministry to prosecutors. Since last April, the ministry has disclosed a total of about 140,000 pages deemed closely related to the scandal to the widow over seven rounds. The ministry said that there are about 310,000 pages of documents not closely linked to the issue. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]