Koizumi Cabinet is to blame for hushing up Foreign Ministry corruption -- Akahata editorial, July 18, 2001

Foreign Ministry officials, including the assistant director of the Economic Affairs Bureau, were arrested on charges of swindling public money. While the details of the embezzlement of secret state funds has yet to be made clear, another corruption scandal has been exposed in the Foreign Ministry.

At the report, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro said, "I want official discipline to be enforced by the ministry." This is a bystander's comment, and not what the chief of the administration should say.

At stake is the Koizumi Cabinet's stance of hushing up corruption and scandals. The latest scandal took the shape of padded bills for limousines hired for last year's Kyushu-Okinawa G-8 summit meeting. The form of corruption was different, but the same design is maintained in which officials misused public money under cover of diplomatic secrecy.

The Liberal Democratic Party tried to describe the embezzlement of secret state funds as a personal crime. The latest scandal has undermined this explanation.

A more serious suspicion persists in that part of the secret state fund which the parliament allotted to the Foreign Ministry could have been offered to the Prime Minister's Official Residence and been used to affect Diet steering. Without examining the matter, foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko definitively stated that the money was not offered. How can the foreign minister correct the built-in structure of corruption in the ministry?

It is serious that the Prime Minister's Official Residence was at the center of political influence buying of parliamentarians of opposition parties outside the Japanese Communist Party. The Koizumi Cabinet actively helped to keep the cover on the scandal.

Prime Minister Koizumi cries for "a change in the LDP." In fact, he is the same as the old LDP and in fact eager in trying to maintain the structure of corruption.

The people desire a bold and lasting move away from political corruption related to the hunt for money and favoring vested interests. Only the Japanese Communist Party has the capacity to achieve this desire, because it never accepts donations from corporations and organizations, and has never touched by graft. (end)