TOKYO, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- The former head of nationalist school operator Moritomo Gakuen and his wife were found guilty on Wednesday of illegally receiving subsidies from the central government to build an elementary school.
The pair were found by the Osaka District Court to have defrauded the central government out of 56.4 million yen (509,650 U.S. dollars) between March 2016 and February 2017 by inflating the costs to a construction company of building an elementary school on land purchased from the government in Osaka.
The court also found ex-Moritomo Gakuen chief Yasunori Kagoike guilty of illegally receiving local government subsidies, and sentenced him to five years in prison. His wife Junko was handed down a three-year jail term suspended for five years.
Kagoike and his wife were also charged with illegally obtaining 120 million yen (1.08 million U.S. dollars) in subsidies between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2016 from the prefecture and the city of Osaka, by falsifying information regarding the number of teachers working at their preschool, saying there were more staff than was in fact the case.
Junko Kagoike, however, was not found guilty on this charge.
The pair were initially arrested in July 2017 after it was found that Moritomo Gakuen had purchased the land in Osaka a year earlier for a fraction of its actual value, triggering a lengthy scandal implicating Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie.
Before the scandal implicating the Abes became fully-fledged, Akie, who had been named honorary principal of the nationalist-leaning elementary school, stepped down from the contentious role.
Kagoike had said he met Akie through a mutual acquaintance around 2011 and went on to say that he had received 1 million yen (9,000 U.S. dollars) from her in 2015. He claimed Akie had said it was from the prime minister, although Abe has denied giving the money to Kagoike.
Japan's Finance Ministry eventually punished 20 officials for their involvement in the falsifying of documents connected to the controversial heavily-discounted sale of the state-owned land to Moritomo Gakuen.
Former top bureaucrat at the ministry at the time, Nobuhisa Sagawa, resigned over his alleged involvement in "setting the direction" of the protracted cronyism scandal and Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso said he would repay his salary as a cabinet minister for one year to take responsibility for the drawn-out scandal.
Although Japan's Finance Ministry admitted to knowingly altering documents to do with the cut-price land sale, no government officials have been indicted over the scandal.
