Crime Tokyo District Court fines ex-LDP lawmaker in first slush fund ruling

And they got away with a slap on their wrist. No surprise here.

The Tokyo District Court on Tuesday found a former lawmaker from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party and his former secretary guilty of filing false political funding reports, marking the first court ruling against a politician who was in office when the high-profile slush fund scandal came to light.

The court fined Yasutada Ono, a former House of Councillors member, 600,000 yen (about US$3,700). His former policy secretary, Yoshiko Iwata, was fined 200,000 yen. The penalties were substantially lower than those sought by prosecutors. The court found the pair guilty of false reporting in only one of the five years covered by the indictment.

According to the ruling, Ono and Iwata conspired to omit from financial reports about 11.2 million yen received in 2022 by Ono's political group, Taishikai. The money had come from the now-disbanded LDP faction formerly headed by the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Prosecutors had sought 1.5 million yen and 500,000 yen respectively from Ono and Iwata for a period covering 2018 to 2022, alleging some 51 million yen was undeclared. Both defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges. Referring to the fines relating to 2022, Ono said after the ruling that he felt "regret that some aspects of the truth were not understood." On finding them not guilty for four of the five years, the ruling said that "reasonable doubt remains" over whether they conspired to omit funds from 2018 to 2021, as it found no evidence of specific instructions from the Abe faction on the handling of the money and of direct communications between Ono and Iwata.

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