Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Nov. 22 explains the issue of unreported income at a meeting of the Lower House Budget Committee. (Takeshi Iwashita)

Amid an uproar from the opposition bloc, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Nov. 22 ordered five factions in his Liberal Democratic Party to clearly explain corrections made to their income and expenditure reports.

Kishida said during the Lower House Budget Committee meeting that his orders to the intraparty groups will be relayed through LDP Secretary-General Toshimitsu Motegi.

“We will work to avoid suspicion from the public,” Kishida said.

The errors included omissions of income gained from fund-raising events.

Kishida insisted that each faction has properly corrected their reports, but opposition lawmakers were not satisfied.

Yoshihiko Noda of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan criticized Kishida’s attitude, saying he lacks a sense of crisis.

“It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Noda said at the meeting. “(The errors) could have been done on an ongoing, structured basis.”

In response, Kishida said the issue concerns political organizations, not the government nor the LDP.

But he added, “I want to ensure that accountability and proper explanations are provided.”

Political organizations can earn “profits” from ticket sales for their fund-raising parties. If an individual or an organization pays more than 200,000 yen ($1,340) for tickets to a single party, their names and accounts must be listed in the organization’s income and expenditure reports under the Political Fund Control Law.

Professor Hiroshi Kamiwaki at Kobe Gakuin University has filed criminal complaints with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, saying the five LDP factions failed to list such income in their reports.

The prime minister’s own Kishida faction left out more than 2 million yen in income from its reports from 2018 to 2021, according to Kamiwaki.

Kishida said the omission was an oversight.

“Many faction members have asked people to purchase tickets, and some paid more than 200,000 yen in total. The names of the payers should have been listed, but they were not because the amount went unnoticed,” he said.

Kishida said the reports were later corrected but the total amount of income remained the same.

CDP lawmaker So Watanabe raised two other issues at the Nov. 22 meeting in the Diet.

He said there have been several instances in the Abe, Motegi, Aso and Nikai factions where purchases of party tickets exceeding 200,000 yen each were not listed. Watanabe said the “oversight” explanation does not apply in these cases.

He also said that all five factions provided incorrect information in their reports for 2019 and 2020 on the number of people who bought fund-raising party tickets.

The numbers have not been corrected, he added.

“It shows how sloppy the correction process has been,” Watanabe said.

Kishida avoided giving a detailed explanation for these issues, saying, “Only those who were involved in the accounting understand what happened.”

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, former secretary-general of the Abe faction, the largest in the LDP, also declined to comment.

‘CLERICAL ERRORS’

Senior officials of the five factions indicated they see no continuing problem because the “clerical errors” have already been “corrected.”

But only the Aso faction disclosed both the corrected numbers and the amount that was not reported. It said total amount omitted was 4.06 million yen in 13 cases from 2019 to 2021.

The Motegi faction said it had 17 omission cases from 2019 to 2021, while the Nikai faction reported 29 omissions from 2018 to 2021.

The Abe faction did not provide any details, saying, “We have not had time to meet with the secretariat.”

The Kishida faction said in a statement that it failed to properly report income from six groups in seven cases from 2018 to 2020. The group also said it will offer a clearer explanation in the future.

(This article was written by Sachiko Miwa and Yoshitaka Isobe.)

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