Govt Partially Releases Moritomo Scandal Documents; Widow of Finance Ministry Bureaucrat Given 2,000 Pages

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:28 JST, April 4, 2025

Documents related to a scandal surrounding the sale of state-owned land to private school operator Moritomo Gakuen were partially disclosed Friday.

Toshio Akagi, an official of the Finance Ministry’s Kinki Local Finance Bureau at the time of the scandal, took his own life at the age of 54 in March 2018. Akagi suffered from depression after being instructed by the ministry’s Financial Bureau to falsify documents.

Akagi’s widow Masako, 54, had asked the ministry to disclose documents that it had submitted to and received back from the special investigation squad of the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office. The documents were submitted on a voluntary basis.

On Friday afternoon, she received more than 2,000 pages of the 170,000 pages of documents at the ministry. They included records summarizing the negotiation process of the sale of state-owned land to Moritomo Gakuen from 2013 to 2016, emails sent and received by the ministry and the finance bureau, and explanatory materials for use within the bureau.

The ministry is to disclose the main contents of the other parts of the documents in stages over the next year.