Photo/Illutration Naoto Watanabe, president of Ohsho Food Service Corp., during a news conference on Oct. 31 in Osaka (Satoru Iizuka)

The unexplained 2013 slaying of a businessman known as the “Gyoza King” may be tied to his efforts to clean up past shady business deals by the company’s management worth billions of yen, say police seeking a motive for the murder.

Takayuki Ohigashi, president of Kyoto-based Ohsho Food Service Corp., a nationwide restaurant chain serving gyoza dumplings, died in a hail of gunfire, allegedly by a high-ranking gangster now in prison for a separate crime.

A joint investigative team of the Kyoto and Fukuoka prefectural police concluded that Ohigashi’s house cleaning may explain his death.

Ohigashi, 72, was shot four times in the chest and stomach with an automatic weapon in a parking lot outside the company’s headquarters in Kyoto’s Yamashina Ward on the morning of Dec. 19, 2013.

Police on Oct. 28 arrested Yukio Tanaka, 56, a senior member of a gangsters’ organization affiliated with Kudo-kai, a group that has a reputation for extreme violence due to its attacks on ordinary citizens.

Police had long suspected a criminal syndicate was behind the murder but were unable to find a motive.

The company, which operates the nationwide Gyoza-no-Ohsho chain, set up a third-party panel to investigate whether it had ties to a criminal organization.

In 2016, the panel discovered that the company had repeatedly made real estate deals to the tune of 26 billion yen ($175 million) since around 1995 with a particular corporate group.

Around 17 billion yen remained uncollected and had been written off as a loss.

The panel said the deals were made by senior officials of the company who were members of the company’s founding family and it was “unclear how each deal was made or if they were economically reasonable.”

It noted that the company’s founding family had held power over the company’s management, based on an undisclosed internal investigative report it used for reference.

The report was made around 2012 and 2013, when Ohigashi was president.

After becoming president in 2000, Ohigashi worked to turn around the troubled company, which still shouldered huge interest-bearing debts, to dissolve illicit business relationships and bad deals.

He set up an internal panel to investigate the activity and find ways to take preventive action.

In September 2013, the panel submitted the results of its investigation to an extraordinary meeting of the company’s board of directors.

Board directors shared the result, and a final report was completed in November.

Ohigashi was killed the following month.

Police sources said a motorbike and a motor scooter, which are believed to have been used by the suspect in the murder, were stolen in October that year.

Police now suspect that plans began to be drawn up to kill Ohigashi when the company’s internal investigation reached its final phase.

Naoto Watanabe, the current president of the company, said Tanaka’s arrest came as a “relief” during an Oct. 31 news conference in which he expressed his hopes the case will be solved soon.

Watanabe also stated that the company does not have any ties with a criminal syndicate.

However, he declined to comment on the company’s past management deals with a particular corporate group or speculate whether that might have played a role in the murder.

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