By TOMOAKI HOSAKA/ Staff Writer
December 10, 2021 at 14:15 JST
Nobuteru Ishihara, a special adviser to the Cabinet, on Dec. 6 (Koichi Ueda)
A ruling Liberal Democratic Party chapter headed by political veteran Nobuteru Ishihara has received government subsidies that are intended to help struggling businesses stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to income and expenditure reports on political funds, the LDP’s Tokyo No. 8 district chapter, which covers a large part of Suginami Ward, received a total of 608,159 yen ($5,365) in the subsidies in April and May 2020. The money was listed as “other income.”
Ishihara’s office said the chapter “checked with governing agencies, attached necessary documents and applied for the (subsidies) appropriately.”
Ishihara, 64, lost his Lower House seat in the Oct. 31 election but was recently hired as a special adviser to the Cabinet by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The chapter’s income and expenditure reports for 2020 were released by the Tokyo Metropolitan Electoral Management Committee.
According to the labor ministry, the subsidies were set up for business operators that had been forced to downsize their operations during the pandemic and suffered monthly year-on-year sales declines of more than 5 percent.
The subsidies are supposed to cover expenses of businesses that offered paid leave allowances and asked staff to take time off work.
Such operators can receive up to 15,000 yen per day.
A political organization with at least one employee is eligible for the subsidies.
Tomoaki Iwai, a professor emeritus on political funding at Nihon University, said that in general terms donations are the major source of income for political organizations.
That makes their monthly income levels more unstable than those of private companies, and it is difficult to judge if decreases or increases in income of a political organization are a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“The public may find it unacceptable for a political organization to use a subsidy system in the same way as a private (organization),” Iwai said.
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