Ex-MUFG Bank Worker Gets 9 Yrs for Safe Deposit Box Thefts

Tokyo, Oct. 6 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo District Court on Monday sentenced a former MUFG Bank employee to nine years in prison for stealing cash and gold worth a total of over 390 million yen from customers’ safe deposit boxes. “The crimes were exceptionally bad,” judge Hironobu Ono at the court said. “Victims who used the safe deposit box services believing they were safe did nothing wrong,” he said. Pointing out that the defendant, Yukari Yamazaki, 47, was in a position of managing spare keys for safe deposit boxes at MUFG Bank branches for which she was working, the judge said that she repeatedly engaged in theft by disabling security using a method available only to a limited number of people. Yamazaki should therefore be strongly condemned, Ono said. The court also recognized that she used money and goods from safe deposit boxes to make up for losses from foreign exchange margin trading and horse racing. “There’s nothing that we need to take into consideration in terms of the circumstances in which she repeatedly committed the crimes with little thought,” the judge said. Public prosecutors had sought a 12-year sentence for Yamazaki. Still, the court concluded that the nine-year sentence is appropriate, given that Yamazaki cooperated with investigations by the bank and the police, talked candidly about other crimes she committed and showed remorse over what she did. After handing down the ruling, Ono told Yamazaki, “It’s necessary for you to reflect deeply on why the incidents occurred and what your problem was, and these are important for your return to society in the future.” According to the ruling, Yamazaki stole 29 gold ingots worth about 333 million yen, cash totaling some 61 million yen and other goods from six customers’ safe deposit boxes between March 2023 and October 2024, when she worked at the bank’s Nerima and Tamagawa branches in Tokyo. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]