The chief executive of Japan Post Holdings Co. and the heads of two subsidiaries will resign to take responsibility for improper sales of insurance products that has prompted the government to plan the imposition of harsh penalties, sources close to the matter said Wednesday.
Masatsugu Nagato, the 71-year-old CEO of the former state-owned postal services group, Japan Post Insurance Co. CEO Mitsuhiko Uehira, 63, and Japan Post Co. CEO Kunio Yokoyama, 63, plan to announce their resignations from their positions at a press conference on Friday, the sources said.
The Financial Services Agency is set to impose a three-month suspension of new sales of insurance products on Japan Post Insurance and Japan Post on Friday, another source close to the matter said, adding that the penalty contents were told to the units on Wednesday.
As Nagato's successor, Hiroya Masuda, a former minister of internal affairs, is among people being eyed as a candidate, the sources said.
Japan Post will hold an executive nomination committee and a board meeting on Friday to decide on the successor, also taking into consideration the view of the Japanese government, its largest shareholder, the sources said.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which supervises the postal group, also plans to issue business improvement orders.
Yasuo Suzuki, senior executive vice president at Japan Post Holdings, will also step down from the post after it was discovered he was obtaining information from the then top bureaucrat at the ministry over a draft plan of the penalty to be imposed on the group.
The top bureaucrat, Shigeki Suzuki, resigned as vice minister of the internal affairs ministry on Friday after admitting to leaking the draft plan to Japan Post's Suzuki, also a former vice minister at the ministry.
A company panel looked at 183,000 suspected cases of improper sales at Japan Post Insurance and Japan Post and found that of those, 12,836 are suspected of violating a law or in-house rules as of Dec. 15. The investigation is ongoing.
"Regarding management responsibility, I will announce it at an appropriate time," Nagato told reporters last week.
Japan Post Holdings, 57 percent owned by the government, sells insurance products through a network of over 20,000 post offices nationwide. The group was privatized in 2007.
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