Kumamoto City Assembly Member, Others Arrested in Bribery Case

Tokyo, May 7 (Jiji Press)–Police arrested three people including a member of the city assembly of Yatsushiro, Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, on Thursday on suspicion of accepting bribes from a contractor for the construction of a new city government building. A total of about 17 billion yen was spent on the city government building, which opened in February 2022. Of the total cost, more than 12 billion yen was raised by selling bonds for reconstruction after the April 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes. According to investigative sources, the city assembly member, Yukio Narimatsu, 54, and two others are suspected of acting at the request of a former head of the Kyushu regional branch of Maeda Corp., a Tokyo-based construction firm, regarding the construction project between 2016 and December 2019. In return, they allegedly received 60 million yen in cash at Narimatsu’s home around June 2021. The two others are Teruyuki Matsuura, an 84-year-old former Yatsushiro city assembly member, and Tadasuke Sonokawa, 61-year-old head of a local construction firm. Over the construction project, the city adopted Maeda’s proposal, mediated by Narimatsu. A consortium including Maeda won the project contract for about 11.8 billion yen, but the value of the contract was later increased to about 13 billion yen. Last October, the Kumamoto prefectural police department received a criminal complaint about the bribery case. Meanwhile, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department was informed by Maeda of the results of its internal investigation in January. The Kumamoto and Tokyo police departments then launched a joint investigation. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]