| Headline: Scandal-hit Japan in no shape to shape up Source: Euromoney Date: February 2001 Author: Kevin Rafferty
Fukushiro Nukaga, a senior member of the cabinet and tipped as a future prime minister, is the third leading MP to go in two weeks. Given that he was in charge of economic policy, it seems Japan’s problems matter less to him than saving his skin. It was not certain Nukaga would quit, even when it was revealed that he took ¥15 million ($135,000) from insurer KSD. His way out was not the traditional response to a lost reputation – disembowelling himself in ritual seppuku – but instead to blame his secretary. Nukaga swears his secretary, not him, received the money and that he returned it as soon as he found it. The opposition says it was received in two tranches at the insurer’s offices, so it could not have been an accident and was in return for inserting comments in then prime minister Keizo Obuchi’s keynote speech to parliament last year. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||