TOKYO (TR) – On Friday, Tokyo Metropolitan Police re-arrested the previous president of a long-established bearing buying and selling firm and two others on suspicion of defrauding Mizuho Bank out of a whole lot of tens of millions of yen in loans.
The improvement is the most recent in an investigation that has uncovered suspected fraud within the billions of yen, a few of which was earmarked for the acquisition of actual property and leasing o luxurious automobiles.
Long-running bearing buying and selling firm Horimasa Kogyo is in the course of chapter proceedings. The three suspects are former president Masaharu Hori, 69, former normal affairs supervisor Shigeyasu Okuma, 73, and 74-year-old tax accountant Kenichi Yamaguchi.
In the most recent arrest, the three are suspected of submitting falsified monetary statements in round November and December of final yr to defraud Mizuho Bank of 600 million yen in loans. The statements had been window-dressed to make it seem as if the corporate was worthwhile, when the truth is it was really within the purple.
Repeated for about 20 years
Last month, Hori and his associates had been arrested for allegedly defrauding Mitsubishi UFJ Bank of 500 million yen in loans utilizing the identical technique. They had been indicted this month.
It is believed that the three had ready totally different monetary statements for every monetary establishment by padding gross sales and decreasing liabilities. The investigation is ongoing, with police believing that three had been attempting to hide the massive amount of cash they’d borrowed from different banks so as to acquire different loans.
Overseas villas and luxurious vehicles
According to the Tokyo police, the submission of such falsified monetary statements is believed to have been repeated for about 20 years, and a guide displaying the window-dressing process was seized.
At the time of the chapter submitting, the corporate’s debt totaled about 25 billion yen to about 50 monetary establishments.
According to the corporate’s chapter petition, loans from the corporate to Hori personally amounted to roughly 3.3 billion yen. According to investigators, Hori is believed to have used the loaned cash for working capital of greater than 10 affiliated firms he managed, in addition to for private consumption, together with the acquisition of trip properties in Japan and overseas and the leasing of luxurious automobiles.
“Preferred customer”
Horimasa Kogyo was based in 1933. In 1950, it turned an agent for NTN, a significant bearing producer. It has bought bearings to main producers of vehicles, development equipment and different merchandise.
The firm had been loaned cash by megabanks and regional banks as a “preferred customer.” In current years, there was a rise in bankruptcies on account of compliance violations, together with the window-dressing of monetary statements, based on Teikoku Databank. In 2023, the variety of bankruptcies on account of compliance irregularities exceeded 300 for the primary time.
The Financial Services Agency is at present investigating whether or not monetary establishments are lax of their loan-screening procedures.