Photo/Illutration An investigator from the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office heads to the office of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's Abe faction on Dec. 19. (Hikaru Uchida)

Prosecutors trying to unravel a money scandal that has rocked factions in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party are running out of time to target key individuals in the groups.

The ordinary Diet session will start in late January, and lawmakers cannot be arrested when parliament is in session.

Aides to faction lawmakers have been questioned on a voluntary basis in the scandal over the suspected failure to properly report income and expenditures related to fund-raising parties.

Prosecutors on Dec. 19 also searched the offices of the LDP’s Abe and Nikai factions in the scandal but not the offices of individual lawmakers.

About 100 investigators from the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office have been assigned to the case.

One high-ranking prosecutor said the searches were intended to look into “the faction system, the character and practices that led to the continual creation of a slush fund.”

Investigative sources said the LDP faction once led by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe accumulated about 500 million yen ($3.5 million) in unreported revenues from fund-raising parties over a five-year period ending in 2022.

The Abe faction’s “slush fund” contained money from sales of tickets to fund-raising parties that exceeded the quotas assigned to each faction member. The excess funds were later returned to those lawmakers, the sources said.

The amounts were not listed as expenditures by the faction nor as income by the individual faction members, the sources said.

The faction led by former LDP Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai is believed to have accumulated about 100 million yen from fund-raising parties that went unreported as income in its reports.

The faction, however, did report the money that was returned to its members as expenditures, and those lawmakers listed the amounts as revenues.

Prosecutors targeted the two factions because of the large amounts accumulated.

“(The two factions) continued as organizations that did not report huge amounts of money,” another senior prosecutor said. “That act was an outright violation of the spirit of the Political Fund Control Law.”

Prosecutors tend to take action in scandals over suspected unreported political funds when the amounts exceed 100 million yen.

Investigators will have to decide who should be held legally responsible for the factions’ apparent violations of the law.

Faction officials and staff in charge of accounting are required to compile the political fund reports, so they would be primarily responsible if amounts were not reported or if the figures were falsified.

Prosecutors could also go after the lawmakers who served in the secretary-general posts at the two factions and oversaw administrative matters for the groups.

A number of prominent lawmakers have held that post in the Abe faction, including Hirokazu Matsuno, who resigned as chief Cabinet secretary on Dec. 14, and Yasutoshi Nishimura, the economy minister who similarly resigned.

To prosecute such lawmakers, investigators would need records confirming that the faction secretaries-general knew about or approved of the nonreporting of revenues from the fund-raising parties.

They could also try to gain an explanation or even a confession from the lawmakers, but the window of opportunity to arrest and interrogate them is closing with the approach of the Diet session.

In the past, aides to lawmakers have been found guilty of improper reporting of political funds, but their bosses have been exonerated because of a lack of evidence showing they gave direct orders to break the law.

Failure to properly list revenues and expenditures on a political fund report carries maximum penalties of five years in prison or a fine of 1 million yen.

(This article was written by Kae Kawashima, Takashi Uematsu and Hikaru Yokoyama.)

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