TOKYO - A Tokyo court on Tuesday found a former lawmaker of Japan's governing party and his then secretary guilty of false reporting under the political funds law, the first ruling against a politician serving when a high-profile slush fund scandal broke.
The Tokyo District Court fined Yasutada Ono, a former House of Councillors lawmaker for the Liberal Democratic Party, 600,000 yen ($3,700) and his former policy secretary Yoshiko Iwata, 200,000 yen, far less than the amounts sought by prosecutors, after the two were found guilty of false reporting in just one of the five years covered by the indictment.
According to the ruling, Ono and Iwata conspired in omitting around 11.2 million yen received by his Taishikai political group from a now-defunct LDP faction formerly led by the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in its 2022 financial report.
Prosecutors had sought 1.5 million yen and 500,000 yen respectively from Ono and Iwata for a period covering 2018 to 2022, alleging some 51 million yen was undeclared.
Both defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges. Referring to the fines relating to 2022, Ono said after the ruling that he felt "regret that some aspects of the truth were not understood."
On finding them not guilty for four of the five years, the ruling said that "reasonable doubt remains" over whether they conspired to omit funds from 2018 to 2021, as it found no evidence of specific instructions from the Abe faction on the handling of the money and of direct communications between Ono and Iwata.
Regarding 2022, however, the court concluded they had colluded, saying it found evidence of specific communications between the two that showed they "recognized the funds should have been declared as donations."
Ono resigned from the LDP upon his indictment in January 2024 and decided not to run for reelection in the 2025 upper house race. His undeclared funds are believed to be the largest among LDP lawmakers implicated in the case.
The special investigation squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office has built cases against 12 people over infractions of the political funds control law, with eight found guilty so far.
The LDP came under scrutiny after it emerged in late 2023 that some of its factions, including Abe's, failed to report excess income from fundraising events and accumulated slush funds, stoking public distrust and contributing to lackluster results in national elections in 2024 and 2025.
