Japan’s Finance Ministry has disclosed documents related to a scandal over the sale of state-owned land to school operator Moritomo Gakuen. The widow of an employee of the ministry’s regional bureau received them on Friday.
Akagi Masako visited the ministry with her lawyers to receive the papers. Her late husband, Akagi Toshio, killed himself after being forced to falsify official documents on the heavily discounted sale of the land in Osaka Prefecture.
Questions about the legitimacy of the discount arose in 2017. Opposition parties suspected politics behind the scenes, as the wife of then Prime Minister Abe Shinzo was the school’s honorary principal at the time. Abe strongly denied his wife’s involvement.
Akagi’s husband took his life in 2018, soon after the fact of the falsification of the documents came to light. She demanded that they be disclosed, but the ministry refused and a lower court upheld the ministry’s decision.
The ministry has finally begun disclosing the documents to Akagi after a high court overturned the lower court ruling and rejected the ministry’s non-disclosure decision, and the government decided not to appeal.
The ministry plans to disclose in phases a total of more than 170,000 pages of documents and electronic data. On Friday, Akagi received over 2,000 pages of papers including the record of negotiations over three years since June 2013, when the school operator bid to buy the land. In June 2016, it bought the land at a price much lower than the appraised value. The government said it discounted the price due to the cost of removing waste found underground.
Ministry officials say they had already submitted to the Diet in 2018 part of the negotiation record. But they say the papers Akagi received also include previously undisclosed information such as emails between the ministry’s regional office and its headquarters in Tokyo. This suggests the possibility that previously unknown facts may come to light.
Akagi released a statement after receiving the documents. She said she was relieved to be able to reach the day of the disclosure after making strenuous efforts to win the ruling. She said she has not confirmed the contents of the documents as there is a large quantity. She expressed hope that what was behind the land sale will be made clear, adding that her husband was forced to falsify information.
