Japan's Finance Ministry on Monday admitted that one of its officials asked the operator of a controversial nationalist school with connections to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife to lie about the reason it received a huge discount for a state-owned plot of land.
Mitsuru Ota, who heads the ministry's bureau in charge of state-owned property, told an upper house audit committee that one of his officials called Moritomo Gakuen's lawyer in February last year, urging the operator to say that thousands of trucks were used to transport construction waste.
The move was aimed at falsely accounting for the huge discount given to Moritomo Gakuen by the government.
Ota said the official made the proposal to keep in line with comments made in the Diet by Nobuhisa Sagawa, who was in charge of the National Tax Agency at the time and was previously in charge of taking care of the state land sale.
He stepped down in early March to take account for the confusion he has caused and was under fire for potentially lying in parliament while serving as director general of the ministry's Financial Bureau.
When quizzed by the opposition, Sagawa had stated that the land was sold "at the proper price."
This meant that if it cost 800 million yen (7.47 million U.S. dollars) to remove the waste, as the school operator was urged to claim, it would have required 4,000 truckloads.
The 8,770-square-meter plot was sold to Moritomo for 134 million yen (1.25 million U.S. dollars), just a fraction of its appraisal value of 956 million yen (8.92 million U.S. dollars).
This led to suspicions the huge discount was given owing to Akie Abe's position as honorary principle at the elementary school planned to be opened on the land.
As the scandal unfolded, Akie, distanced herself from the school and its operator.
The huge discount was, the ministry has always maintained, due to the waste disposal costs.
Ota apologized for Sagawa's statement to the Diet that the land was sold at the proper price, saying that the facts were not fully confirmed when the statement was made.
Opposition parties said on Monday that they suspect the 800 million yen discount remains unjustified and and Finance Minister Taro Aso and Abe should step down to account for the scandal.
