Photo/Illutration Moritomo Gakuen had planned to open a private elementary school on this plot of land in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, previously owned by the government. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Opposition lawmakers accused Finance Ministry officials of breaking the law by refusing to disclose documents about a questionable sale of state-owned land and giving the flimsy excuse that the records did not exist.

At the March 2 Lower House Budget Committee, the opposition Diet members said that lying to avoid releasing public documents violates the information disclosure law.

The questioning regarded records of meetings between officials of the Finance Ministry and Moritomo Gakuen, an educational institution that wanted to buy state-owned land in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, to open a private elementary school.

Finance Minister Taro Aso said information disclosure requests concerning the records were rejected 46 times because the documents being sought did not exist.

Specifically, nine of the requests were rejected by the Tokyo headquarters of the Finance Ministry, while the Kinki Local Finance Bureau in Osaka, which was in charge of the land sale, did so 37 times, Aso said, in response to questioning by Hiroshi Kawauchi, a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.

According to documents Kawauchi obtained from the Finance Ministry, the rejections were made between March 22, 2017, and May 11, 2018.

Kawauchi noted that on May 23, 2018, the Finance Ministry released about 950 pages of documents recording the various meetings held between Moritomo Gakuen and the Finance Ministry. Those records included ones that had supposedly not existed.

A month later, the Finance Ministry released a report of its own investigation into the falsifying of the documents related to the Moritomo Gakuen land deal. All references to Akie Abe, wife of then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, were deleted by Finance Ministry officials.

The former head of Moritomo Gakuen had boasted of his close ties to the first lady, and opposition lawmakers argued that the relationship was the reason Moritomo Gakuen received a huge discount when it bought the land.

A June 2018 Finance Ministry report stated that ministry officials had rejected information disclosure requests on grounds such documents did not exist. However, that report never gave a specific number of times such rejections were made.

Opposition lawmakers in February 2017 had demanded in the Diet that the records of exchanges with Moritomo Gakuen be disclosed.

On Feb. 24, 2017, Nobuhisa Sagawa, then director-general of the Finance Ministry’s Financial Bureau, responded in the Lower House Budget Committee that such records did not exist.

But in a June 2018 report, the Finance Ministry admitted that at the time Sagawa gave his response in the Diet, the heads of the Planning and Administration Division and Office of Individual Issue Coordination of Government Assets under the Financial Bureau were aware that records of the exchanges with Moritomo Gakuen did indeed exist.

At the March 2 Lower House Budget Committee session, Kawauchi asked Aso if saying that documents did not exist when in fact they were available was a violation of the Information Access Law.

Aso only said such action was “inappropriate,” but he did not touch upon whether such acts were illegal.

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