Photo/Illutration Lower House member Yoshitaka Ikeda belongs to the Liberal Democratic Party’s Abe faction. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Prosecutors arrested ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Yoshitaka Ikeda on Jan. 7 on suspicion of failing to report about 48 million yen ($330,000) that his political organization received from the LDP’s Abe faction.

Ikeda, 57, is the first lawmaker to be arrested in the scandal that has embroiled the faction once headed by Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister who was slain by a gunman in July 2022.

The Abe faction is suspected of having kept about 500 million yen in revenues from fund-raising parties off the books between 2018 and 2022.

Prosecutors suspect the Lower House member failed to list the 48.26 million yen on his organization’s political fund reports over those five years in conspiracy with his policy secretary, Kazuhiro Kakinuma, who oversees accounting, sources said.

Prosecutors also arrested Kakinuma, 45, who is responsible for preparing political fund income and expenditure reports of the political fund management organization, Ikeda Reimei-kai, the sources said.

The LDP decided to expel Ikeda following his arrest. 

“We sincerely apologize for the great concern and inconvenience we have caused to all concerned,” the Abe faction said in a statement. “We will continue to cooperate with investigations, and we will do what we must do to regain trust in politics as soon as possible.”

The Abe faction, the LDP’s largest, assigned quotas for sales of tickets to its fund-raising parties to member lawmakers.

If a lawmaker exceeded the sales quota, the faction returned the extra money to him or her and did not record the money as income on its political fund reports, the sources said.

The member lawmakers also did not record the cash they received on political fund reports of their political organizations, they said.

The 48.26 million yen is believed to be the second-largest amount that an Abe faction lawmaker received over the five years through 2022, for which the statute of limitations has not expired for such false reporting offenses, the sources said.

Ikeda corrected political fund reports of his political organization as of Dec. 8, apparently to add 48.26 million yen in “donations” from the Abe faction over the five years.

On Dec. 27, prosecutors searched Ikeda’s office in a Diet members’ office building in Tokyo and his office in Nagoya in connection with the political fund scandal.

Ikeda, a former president of a chemicals company and a former president of Junior Chamber International Japan, was first elected to the Lower House in 2012. In 2021, he won his fourth term through proportional representation to represent the Tokai bloc.

Related News