Hatoyama’s Dead Donors Being Probed

According to the Yomiuri today, prosecutors have started an investigation into political donations to Prime Minister Hatoyama. This scandal originally reared its head in July, just months after Ozawa Ichiro had been forced to stand down when his aide was indicted for falsifying reports of political donations. The embarrasment continued for the DPJ when it was found that the new leader of the party, Hatoyama, also had errors in his donation reports.

It was found that over four years from 2005, some 21.78 million yen was reported in the form of 193 suspect donations to Hatoyama’s fund management organization. Between 4 and 7 million of this money was donated under the names of people that had already been dead. According to Hatoyama and his lawyer at the time, the aide responsible for keeping these accounts had been ‘embarrassed’ by the lack of donations, and had thus shifted some of Hatoyama’s own money into the account as donations. Apparently Hatoyama had no idea of what was going on. However, the account given of the ‘embarassment of the aide’ is a little cloudy, due to the fact that over the period from 2003 to 2007 Hatoyama reported between 50 and 110 million yen per year in donations, far more than other LDP or DPJ party leaders such as Ozawa and Koizumi…

Under the Political Fund Control Law, people that donate less than 50,000 yen, and who do not claim the donation as a tax deduction do not need to have their names and addresses reported. I will admit to not knowing all the ins and outs of this law, but this seems like a lot of money to be going unreported. Especially given that the fact that it is unreported means that there is no way of confirming that individual donations were in fact made of less than 50,000 yen, and not one big donation that was broken up into little pieces… I need to do a lot more looking into this issue, and I’m sure it will be in the news a lot over the coming weeks if prosecutors are indeed investigating the Prime Minister and his former aide.

New leader of the opposition, Tanigaki, has already signalled his intention to push the Prime Minister for answers when the Diet returns on the 26th of this month.

While it is unclear if there has been any wrongdoing by the Prime Minister himself, at the very least he was irresponsible in not checking what was going on with his donations (especially given their size). It remains to be seen also whether the donations can actually be traced back to Hatoyama’s personal funds, which is where the aide said they originated. If this cannot be proven, then the issue becomes a lot bigger, with the possibility that the money is part of an illegal donation from unknown parties… One thing that can be said for the revelation of a proescution being opened up here, is that at least the prosecutor isn’t being stopped by the government…. at least not yet…..

It is still unclear how this story will develop, but could it be that Hatoyama could end up as one of the shortest serving Prime Ministers in Japanese history…..? One of the other’s to have a short stay in the Prime Minister’s residence was ironically the last man to form a coalition government without the LDP, Hosokawa Morihiro. He served for just 9 months in 1993-94, and was forced to resign under allegations that he had misused personal funds in the 1980s….

Its probably unlikely that Hatoyama will be forced to stand down at this stage, but scandals like this have a tendency to grow a life of their own, and its impossible to say where this will eventually lead. At this point there is no specific allegation of impropriety on the part of Hatoyama, just a lot of unanswered questions. He will hope that he can answer these questions satisfactorily….