Photo/Illutration Yasuo Mori speaks at a media briefing on test events for the 2020 Tokyo Games on Nov. 27, 2020. (Pool)

For key players at advertising giant Dentsu Inc., the “fix” was in as early as in 2016 for the Tokyo Summer Games, sources said.

Documents presented at a meeting that year on awarding contracts for events related to the 2020 Olympics showed the agency planned to hold biddings “in name only,” the sources said.

The contract money totaled about 40 billion yen ($300 million).

Tokyo prosecutors have arrested four people, including Yasuo Mori, 55, who served as deputy executive director of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee’s operations bureau, and Koji Henmi, 55, former assistant director of Dentsu’s sports division, on suspicion of violating the Anti-Monopoly Law.

They are believed to have arranged beforehand which companies would win contracts to operate pre-Olympic test events and actual Olympic events.

The organizing committee started placing orders for those operations in May 2018.

According to the sources, a senior staff member of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee who was on loan from Dentsu arranged a meeting at the company in 2016 with senior Dentsu officials who were in charge of the Games.

The purpose of the meeting was to share information on the commissioning of Olympic operation projects to businesses.

The senior staff member put together the materials presented at the meeting.

“Make the bidding exist in name only, and not in reality, and maximize the benefits for Dentsu,” one of the documents said, according to the sources.

Henmi attended that meeting, the sources said.

The Tokyo Olympic organizing committee appointed Dentsu as the marketing agency in charge of finding companies to become Olympic sponsors.

In 2017, however, higher-ups in the organizing committee told Dentsu that it wanted to cut its payment to the agency by about 5 billion yen as part of overall cost reductions for the Games.

Dentsu said such a cutback was unacceptable. It offered an alternative to the committee: Give Dentsu complete authority on commissioning Olympic-related operation tasks to other companies, and Dentsu would slash costs through the process.

Under the proposed plan, the organizing committee would set up an internal bureau consisting of Dentsu employees.

For each sport event, the bureau would assign operation tasks to companies with experience in sporting events, and keep commission costs low, Dentsu said.

The organizing committee, however, rejected the proposal.

Afterward, Dentsu, in coordination with the organizing committee, asked each company competing for contracts about their intentions. Lists of candidates’ names were created for each project.

In March 2018, Mori showed the lists to a senior official of the organizing committee.

“It’s mostly Dentsu,” the official said, expressing concerns that “pro-Dentsu bidding conditions will draw criticism.”

The number of orders Dentsu was expected to receive was then reduced.

Twenty-six bidding sessions were held for businesses on plans for test events in each venue.

Dentsu and another company were awarded the most, with five contracts each.

The winners of the bids were almost always companies on the lists of candidates, indicating the results were pre-determined, the sources said.

Tokyo prosecutors said pre-adjustments made from February to July 2018 amounted to bid-rigging.

They suspect Dentsu’s influence-peddling approach and its intention to make adjustments within the industry led to the collusion.

A source close to Dentsu told The Asahi Shimbun that the presentation materials at the 2016 meeting did not reflect the thinking of the entire company.

“It was one employee’s potential and vague idea, and as it turned out it did not even maximize benefits for Dentsu,” the source said.

Dentsu’s PR department declined to comment on the matter.

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