Photo/Illutration Yasuo Mori, a former senior official of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee, enters the Tokyo District Court on July 5. (Pool)

A former senior official of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee pleaded guilty on July 5 to rigging bids for pre-Olympic test events and actual competitions in the 2021 Summer Games.

Yasuo Mori, 56, who served as deputy executive director of the organizing committee’s operations bureau, admitted to violating the Anti-Monopoly Law during the first hearing of his trial at the Tokyo District Court.

The hearing was the first in the Olympic bid-rigging scandal.

Six companies, including advertising giant Dentsu Inc., and six of their officials have also been indicted on bid-rigging charges.

According to prosecutors’ opening statement, divisions of the organizing committee, including Mori’s operations bureau, decided to hold a competitive tender for contracts for planning test events in accordance with the committee’s accounting rules.

However, by January 2018, they decided that the winners of the test event planning contracts would also be awarded the contracts for organizing the test events as well as the corresponding Olympic competitions, without a bidding process.

The divisions concluded that “the organizing committee would be placed at a disadvantage in terms of both schedule and cost” if bids are invited again for these subsequent operations, prosecutors said.

Mori and others negotiated with representatives of seven companies between February and April that year and created an “agreement to follow the allocation of prospective winning bidders determined by Mori and Dentsu.”

Twenty-six tenders for planning the test events were held by July, and nine companies, including the seven engaged in the scheme, and one joint venture won the contracts worth about 570 million yen ($3.94 million) in total.

All of the successful bidders went on to receive contracts for organizing the test events and the Olympic competitions without a competitive tender. The value of those negotiated contracts totaled about 43.15 billion yen.

The seven companies secured between about 600 million yen and about 5.2 billion yen in gross profits. The profit margins were higher than those for other sports events, prosecutors said.

ADK Holdings Inc., the nation’s third-largest advertising agency, was among the seven companies engaged in the bid-rigging scheme, but it was granted leniency and not indicted because it was the first to inform the Fair Trade Commission about the case.

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