Photo/Illutration Yasutoshi Nishimura, a former economy minister, speaks at the Lower House Deliberative Council on Political Ethics on March 1. (Pool)

Three politicians who resigned from their Cabinet posts over funding irregularities within their faction in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party denied involvement in the scandal at an ethics panel inquiry on March 1.

The Lower House Deliberative Council on Political Ethics held its second day of questioning, focusing on the LDP faction that accumulated the largest amount of unreported money through fund-raising parties.

Yasutoshi Nishimura and Hirokazu Matsuno, who had both served as secretary-general of the Abe faction, appeared before the panel on the morning of March 1.

Nishimura resigned as economy minister and Matsuno stepped down as chief Cabinet secretary after the scandal came to light.

But they both told the council they were not involved in the creation of what amounted to a slush fund with the money later returned to members of the faction once led by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

An LDP committee looking into the matter said Abe faction members failed to list in their political fund reports a combined total of close to 500 million yen ($3.3 million) accumulated through fund-raising parties between 2018 and 2022.

“Until now, I have never seen financial records of the faction,” said Nishimura, who was secretary-general of the Abe faction from October 2021 until August 2022.

He added that he did not know when the practice started of returning to faction members the amounts in excess of their quotas for tickets sold for fund-raising parties.

Nishimura said he was not aware of the long-standing practice because that matter was handled by the faction leader and a faction staff member in charge of accounting. He also said he was unaware that faction members did not include those amounts in their political fund reports.

Yukio Edano, the former head of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, asked Nishimura about Abe’s attempt in 2022 to end the practice of returning excess amounts to faction members.

Nishimura explained that in April 2022, he met with Abe, Ryu Shionoya, Hakubun Shimomura and Hiroshige Seko, three other top faction officials, to discuss ending the practice. The five agreed to stop returning the excess amount, and Nishimura, in his role as faction secretary-general, informed other younger faction members of the decision.

But Abe was assassinated three months later while giving a campaign speech in Nara city.

Nishimura said faction members then began asking him to return the excess amounts they had collected for the fund-raising parties.

He said he discussed the matter with other faction executives in early August, but no decision was made. He said he did not know what transpired thereafter because he left his faction post to become economy minister on Aug. 10, 2022.

The afternoon session of the panel was delayed because a Lower House plenary session was called to vote on a resolution submitted by the opposition to remove Itsunori Onodera as chairman of the Lower House Budget Committee.

The opposition claimed Onodera overstepped his authority by forcing a vote on the fiscal 2024 budget in the committee even though they felt sufficient deliberations had not been conducted.

The Lower House defeated the resolution, and the ethics panel resumed from 5 p.m.

Shionoya, who was the de facto leader of the Abe faction, apologized for the practice in the political sector that was far removed from public sentiment.

He acknowledged receiving a total of 2.34 million yen back from the faction in the five-year period but said the money was not used for personal reasons.

He said he had no idea when or how the practice of returning money to faction members began.

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