Osaka prosecutors decided Thursday not to indict former top Finance Ministry official Nobuhisa Sagawa for allegedly falsifying documents on a murky land sa
OSAKA – Osaka prosecutors decided Thursday not to indict former top Finance Ministry official Nobuhisa Sagawa for allegedly falsifying documents on a murky land sale that has sparked allegations of cronyism by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration.
Sagawa and other ministry officials had been facing claims that they doctored documents on the 2016 sale of state-owned land to Moritomo Gakuen, a nationalist school operator with ties to Abe’s wife, at a greatly discounted price.
The ministry has admitted that parts of the documents were rewritten to make them consistent with Sagawa’s testimony to the Diet, including removing references to Akie Abe and the “special circumstances” of the sale.
More than 300 sections in 14 sets of documents were manipulated after the questionable land deal came to light in February last year.
But prosecutors were apparently unable to determine that the changes were substantial enough to constitute a criminal offense, as key parts in the documents, such as the terms of the land sale contract, were not falsified and it therefore cannot be said that the essence of the papers changed substantially compared with original documents, according to informed sources.
