Jiji PressTOKYO (Jiji Press) — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied Monday that a remark he made last year in the Diet led to the manipulation of Ministry of Finance documents on a state land plot sold to school operator Moritomo Gakuen.
Speaking at a House of Councillors Budget Committee meeting, Abe also denied having given instructions to alter the documents.
On Feb. 17 last year, Abe told a House of Representatives Budget Committee meeting that he would resign as prime minister and as a lawmaker if he or his wife, Akie, were proved to have been involved in the deal to sell the land to the school operator at a massive discount.
Abe’s wife was once appointed honorary principal of an elementary school that Moritomo Gakuen planned to set up on the land plot in western Japan.
In the document alteration scandal, the name of Abe’s wife and related descriptions were deleted from some of the Finance Ministry documents.
Opposition parties claim that Abe’s remark about his resignation was behind the document tampering. But the prime minister said on Monday that the deleted descriptions do not clash with his remark denying his involvement.
“I guess they were deleted regardless of whether they were about my wife,” Abe told the upper house committee meeting.
He also said he did not even know that the Finance Ministry documents in question existed, adding that it was impossible for him to tell officials to manipulate them.
Abe previously said he received a report on the document tampering on March 11, while the land ministry claimed that it reported the possibility of the manipulation to the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry on March 5.
Regarding this discrepancy, Abe said Monday that Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Kazuhiro Sugita briefed him on related movements on March 6 and that the prime minister received a detailed report on the matter from the ministry on March 11.
On plunging public support for his administration shown in opinion polls by media organizations, Abe said: “The document manipulation issue has shaken people’s confidence in public administration as a whole. I take the situation seriously.”
The opposition Democratic Party requested a vote within Monday on the summoning of former National Tax Agency chief Nobuhisa Sagawa, who was head of the ministry’s Financial Bureau when the documents were altered, to the Diet for sworn testimony on the issue.
The party also asked for the summoning of Akie Abe and Saeko Tani, who served as an assistant to the prime minister’s wife as a government official.
“I don’t think at all that Sagawa was under various pressures,” Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said, denying any political pressure to manipulate the documents.
Financial Bureau Director General Mitsuru Ota said bureau officials were involved in the document tampering. But he added that the officials carried out the manipulation without any instructions from their seniors