Photo/Illutration Members of the Liberal Democratic Party faction once led by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gather at a fund-raising party in Tokyo in May 2019. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The official in charge of accounting for the former Abe faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party generally admitted to the charges against him in the first hearing on May 10 at Tokyo District Court.

Junichiro Matsumoto, 76, is charged with making false entries in the political fund reports of the faction once led by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for the years between 2018 and 2022.

In particular, he failed to include about 680 million yen ($4.4 million) as income from fund-raising parties and an equivalent amount as expenditures in the form of kickbacks to faction members.

The total unreported amount came to about 1.35 billion yen, according to the indictment.

During the hearing, Matsumoto pointed out one error in the case brought by prosecutors. He argued that he was unaware that some faction members kept amounts that exceeded their ticket quotas for the fund-raising party without providing all ticket revenues to the faction for the years 2018 and 2019.

He claimed to have not known those amounts should have been included as faction revenue.

Matsumoto is the first indicted defendant to appear before a court. He has been in charge of accounting for the Abe faction since February 2019.

He handled the selling of tickets to fund-raising parties by members and directly handed the amounts in excess of ticket quotas to aides to the lawmakers.

In total, 10 individuals, including three current and former Diet members, have been indicted in the money scandal arising from fund-raising parties.

Yaichi Tanigawa, 82, resigned from the Lower House after receiving a summary indictment and was found guilty. Two other Diet members, Yoshitaka Ikeda, 57, of the Lower House and Yasutada Ono, 64 of the Upper House, are contesting their indictments in court.

All three formerly belonged to the Abe faction. Their aides have also been indicted.

Of the three other individuals indicted, two were in charge of accounting for the Nikai and Kishida factions while the third was an aide to Toshihiro Nikai, a former LDP secretary-general.

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

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