A Tokyo court on Tuesday sentenced former executives of stuffed toy maker Sun Arrow Inc. to suspended prison terms for providing around 2 million yen ($14,000) in bribes to a former Tokyo Olympic organizing committee executive.
In the trial, one of a series of Tokyo Olympic bribery cases, the Tokyo District Court gave the firm's former president, Taiji Sekiguchi, 50, and his father and former Sun Arrow executive Yoshihiro Sekiguchi, 75, sentences of one year in prison, suspended for three years.
The two are among 15 people indicted for allegedly giving bribes to former organizing committee executive Haruyuki Takahashi, who had influence over Olympic sponsorship and marketing contracts. Five of them, including a former chairman of major business suit retailer Aoki Holdings Inc., have so far been found guilty.
Sun Arrow sold officially licensed stuffed toys of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics mascots -- the blue-and-white Miraitowa and the pink Someity.
Presiding Judge Yasuaki Takahashi ruled that the former Sun Arrow executives asked for favors from Takahashi, including over concluding a licensing contract, and paid him 1.5 percent of the total sales of the licensed products every three months in return.
He said the Sekiguchis were given suspended sentences since they admitted to the charges and expressed remorse for their acts.
Prosecutors had sought one-year prison terms for them.
According to the ruling, the Sekiguchis colluded to transfer around 2 million yen into the bank account of a now-disbanded consulting firm headed by Takahashi's acquaintance Joji Matsui between January 2020 and April 2021.
Takahashi and Matsui have been indicted for getting the former Sun Arrow executives to pay around 7 million yen into the account, but the Sekiguchis were indicted only for the portion for which the three-year statute of limitations for giving bribes has not expired.
Takahashi, 79, was a former senior managing director of Japan's largest advertising agency, Dentsu Inc., which sent many of its employees to the organizing committee's marketing division.
Sun Arrow is known for selling stuffed toys depicting characters from Studio Ghibli's "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service," and also distributed stuffed toys of mascots from the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998.
