Dentsu Fined ¥300 Mil. Over Tokyo Games Bid Rigging; Company Executive Receives Suspended Sentence

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:57 JST, January 31, 2025

The Tokyo District Court has fined advertising giant Dentsu Group Inc. ¥300 million, as demanded by prosecutors, in a bid rigging case related to the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics held in 2021.

The court also sentenced Koji Henmi, 57, former deputy head of the sports department at the group on Thursday to two years in prison suspended for four years. Prosecutors had sought a two-year sentence.

Lawyers for Dentsu and Henmi appealed the ruling the same day.

Dentsu Group and other individual defendants, including Henmi, were charged with bid rigging in violation of the Antimonopoly Law.

“[The defendants] engaged in large-scale bid rigging to win contracts for work related to the Olympics. Dentsu cannot escape blame for undermining competition by influencing other companies in its position as the largest company,” presiding Judge Kenji Yasunaga said.

According to the ruling, Dentsu conspired with a 57-year-old former deputy executive director of the Tokyo Games organizing committee’s operations bureau, who had already been found guilty, and others in the bid rigging scheme. Between February and July 2018, they decided which companies would receive contracts from the organizing committee for the planning of test events, their management and the operation of events at the Games, the ruling said.

The projects were worth a total of about ¥43.7 billion.

At the trial, the defense admitted to rigging the bids for test event-planning contracts, but denied collusion over the other two types of contract.

The court noted that the organizing committee had a basic policy that the companies that won contracts for planning the test events would also win contracts for the subsequent operations. It ruled that the companies were aware of this policy through the former deputy executive director and others, and that they coordinated with each other. The court concluded that collusion was conducted for all three types of contracts.