Police to question 10 people in 5.5 bil. yen land fraud targeting Sekisui House
(Mainichi Japan)
TOKYO -- The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is set to begin questioning around 10 people over a Tokyo land plot deal in which major housing company Sekisui House Ltd. was defrauded of roughly 5.5 billion yen, people close to the investigation said.
Investigators at the MPD's Second Criminal Investigation Division suspect that the targets of their probe, including a male company director in his 60s, are so-called "jimen-shi" -- fraudsters who sell and buy other people's land plots without the owners' consent.
The investigators suspect that some of those people used doctored documents to pretend that they owned an approximately 2,000-square-meter plot in the Nishigotanda district of the capital's Shinagawa ward. Sekisui House paid a total of 6.3 billion yen for the plot of land between April and June last year.
Following the payment, the housing company headquartered in the western Japan city of Osaka tried to register its ownership of the land where an inn used to stand, but couldn't because the relevant documents were found to have been doctored. The company reported 5.55 billion yen of the payment as losses and filed a criminal complaint.
An internal probe by the company found that then Chairman Isamu Wada and then President Toshinori Abe (current chairman) bore responsibilities in the case because the transaction proceeded though there were opportunities to discover the fraud. Wada stepped down in January this year.
(Japanese original by Tomoko Igarashi and Kazuki Sakuma, City News Department)