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Japan Policy & Politics - Ex-lawmaker, 7 indicted over vote buying involving dentist group

TOKYO, Aug. 17 Kyodo

Tokyo prosecutors indicted Yukihiro Yoshida, a former lawmaker of Japan's governing Liberal Democratic Party, and seven others Tuesday on charges of buying votes using money from the Japan Dental Association before a lower house election last November.

Of the eight, Yoshida, 43, who lost his Diet seat in the House of Representatives election, Hirotake Uchida, 63, former director of the dentist group, and Yasushi Miwa, 60, head of the Aichi prefectural dentist association, were charged with giving checks to local assembly members in violation of the Public Offices Election Law.

The other five are three Aichi Prefectural Assembly members and two Nagoya Municipal Assembly members charged with receiving checks for 2 million yen each around September last year from Miwa, who was also serving as the chief of a local LDP arm, to round up votes in an effort to help Yoshida win in the general election.

The eight have admitted to the charges in principle, according to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office.

Yoshida, formerly a dentist, first won a lower house seat in 1996 as a member of the now-defunct New Frontier Party (Shinshinto) and later moved to the New Conservative Party, also defunct. He switched to the LDP when he was reelected in 2000.

The prosecutors indicted Yoshida, Uchida and Sadao Usuda, 73, on Aug. 4 for embezzling the association's money in 2001 to help Usuda's efforts to be reelected as JDA chairman in March 2003. Usuda won the association's chairmanship election in 2000 and was easily reelected in 2003.

The money was withdrawn from a JDA account as a political donation to Yoshida in late August 2001 and returned to Usuda and Uchida for vote-buying operations in November and December 2002, they said.

The latest charges surfaced in the process of investigations into the embezzlement case, involving looking into the flow of political contributions by the dental association's political arm.

Former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto has resigned as head of the LDP's largest faction over an undeclared 100 million yen donation he allegedly received from the dental association.