Finance Minister Taro Aso said Thursday his ministry has no plan to reopen investigations into document falsification claims related to the Moritomo Gakuen land sale scandal and its links to cronyism allegations against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
He made the comment after a note written by a former ministry official saying the doctoring was ordered by Nobuhisa Sagawa, then chief of the ministry's Finance Bureau, was revealed Wednesday, contradicting testimony given by Sagawa.
Despite this, Aso told a press conference that he does not think that "new facts have been found (after the ministry's investigative report was compiled), so we have no intention to launch another investigation."
Regional revitalization minister Seigo Kitamura, who is also in charge of managing official documents, backed Aso in a separate press conference, saying that he sees no need to reopen the investigation because the Finance Ministry "has already scrutinized" the case.
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The lawyer of the wife of Toshio Akagi, the former official who penned the note before killing himself in March 2018, decided to release the document.
Takagi's wife at the same time filed a damages suit against the state and Sagawa.
She alleges her husband suffered severe mental distress after being ordered to alter the documents and is seeking 110 million yen ($1 million) in damages.
Akagi worked for a section of the Kinki Local Finance Bureau that negotiated a heavily discounted price in the sale of state-owned land in Osaka to Moritomo Gakuen, a school operator linked to the prime minister's wife Akie.
He wrote in the note that matters related to the school operator were handled entirely by the Finance Ministry and that orders to alter the land deal documents came from Sagawa.
In the 2018 report, the ministry, which oversaw the land sale in 2016, admitted that documents related to the transaction had been altered, and references to the sale price and the prime minister's wife had been deleted.
But Sagawa denied any role in doctoring the documents and the ministry said his subordinates decided to make the changes before releasing them to lawmakers debating the cronyism allegations in parliament.
In a separate move on Thursday, a group of lawmakers from four opposition parties held their first meeting with Finance Ministry officials to review the matter following the legal action by Akagi's wife.
The officials told the lawmakers there is no plan to look into the matter again, but that did not dissuade the opposition party representatives from pledging to continue their own investigation.
In 2019, Osaka prosecutors decided not to press charges against Sagawa and other Finance Ministry officials over the alleged document alterations.
