THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
January 15, 2025 at 15:45 JST
Yukari Imamura leaves the Nerima Police Station in Tokyo on Jan. 14. (Jin Nishioka)
A former deputy branch manager at MUFG Bank Ltd. was arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department on Jan. 14 on suspicion of stealing customers’ money and valuables from safety deposit boxes.
Yukari Imamura, 46, who lives in Tokyo’s Nerima Ward, admitted to the charges.
“It is correct that I committed theft,” she said.
The MPD said that the amount is estimated to be nearly 2 billion yen ($12.7 million).
Imamura had been spending the money on foreign exchange margin trading (FX) and horse racing, according to sources.
This incident has shaken trust in the banking industry to the core and has developed into a criminal case.
According to the Second Investigation Division of the MPD, Imamura allegedly used a master key and a spare key to illegally open the safety deposit boxes of two male customers at the bank’s Nerima branch in late September last year without their permission.
She is alleged to have stolen a total of about 20 kilograms of gold bars with a total market value of about 260 million yen.
The stolen gold was pawned at seven pawnshops in Tokyo and Chiba Prefecture for a total of 170 million yen.
The incident came to light at the end of October last year when a customer noticed the theft.
In November, the bank dismissed Imamura as a disciplinary measure for stealing money and items from safety deposit boxes at the Nerima and Tamagawa branches, where she worked from April 2020 to October 2024.
The bank also reported the incident to the MPD as a criminal case in late December.
In her job as a deputy branch manager, Imamura was in charge of customers' safety deposit boxes. She admitted that she had committed theft and used the assets she had stolen for her personal investments and other purposes in response to the bank’s investigation.
According to MUFG Bank officials, employees such as Imamura who initially joined the bank in a non-career position and get promoted to deputy branch manager’s positions usually demonstrate reliable performance.
Imamura also maintained a solid reputation at her workplace.
On the other hand, according to investigators, she had money problems in her personal life.
Her debts had grown through FX trading and betting on horse racing, and was forced to apply to the Tokyo District Court for bankruptcy rehabilitation in 2013, which was approved.
She kept her financial problems hidden from her employer, as FX trading by bank employees is prohibited by the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law.
After that, she stopped both horse racing betting and FX trading for about a year, but she started up the practices again.
The MPD believes that Imamura began the thefts around 2020, when she was put in charge of safety deposit boxes.
According to the MPD, Imamura incurred a loss of 1 billion yen in FX trading alone and had large debts through loans from consumer finance companies.
The bank announced that the number of customers affected was estimated to be 60 and the damage totaled more than 1 billion yen in market value.
(This article was written by Tabito Fukutomi and Arata Mitsui.)
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