TOKYO, Dec. 14 Japanese Government Secretary-General Hirokazu Matsuno announced about his resignation.
«»Nowadays there are different opinions regarding the funds of political parties. Because of this, people's trust in politics is decreasing. There are different instructions regarding my own reporting on political funds. In order to avoid delays in national politics, I submitted today request to Prime Minister (Fumio) Kishida to relieve me from my position as government secretary-general,” Matsuno said during a regularly scheduled news conference broadcast live.
Three Kishida government ministers resigned Thursday morning over the party's kickback scandal. Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura, Minister of National Affairs and Communications Junji Suzuki and Minister of Rural Forestry and Fisheries Ichiro Miyashita submitted their resignations to the prime minister on Thursday morning, which were accepted.
On Wednesday, candidates for their positions were determined. The post of Secretary General of the Government will be replaced by Matsuno by former Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi. Ken Saito, who served as Minister of Justice from November 2022 to September 2023, will replace Nishimura as Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry. Takeaki Matsumura, who previously held this post, will become Minister of National Affairs. The post of Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries will be taken by Tetsushi Sakamoto, the former Minister of Regional Reconstruction.
A special unit of the Tokyo Prosecutor's Office is currently investigating the concealment of funds received by factions of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Japan from meetings to raise money for the party involving its politicians. Tickets to these meetings are often purchased by Japanese business representatives. To prevent the system from turning into bribery of politicians or factions, by law, if the amount collected in one evening exceeds 200 thousand yen (1.3 thousand dollars), the names of the donors and the amounts must be entered in the reporting book.
However, it turned out that in the largest faction of ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, unspecified amounts of more than 500 million yen were found over 5 years, which is at least about 3 million dollars. Further investigation revealed that if a politician collected more than the required amount, a “kickback” of the excess was returned to him. These amounts were also not indicated either in party documents or in the reports of the deputies themselves. In the Abe faction, at least several dozen people received such kickbacks, the amounts of which amount to tens of millions of yen.
At the center of a scandal about receiving kickbacks from party funds was the General Secretary of the Government, the “right hand” of Kishida Matsuno. Matsuno, like Nishimura, as well as almost the entire party leadership, are suspected of receiving more than 10 million yen (about 69.4 thousand dollars) over the past 5 years in the form of kickbacks from party funds. In addition to Matsuno and Nishimura, representatives of the top leadership of the party were involved in the scandal — the head of the LDP political council and ex-Minister of Economy Koichi Hagiuda, LDP Secretary General in the House of Councilors and ex-Minister of Economy, who was responsible under Shinzo Abe and for economic relations with Russia, Hiroshige Seko, Chairman of the Committee for Interaction with Parliament Tsuyoshi Takagi, former Minister for the Tokyo Olympics Seiko Hashimoto.