Japan Economy Minister Amari to explain graft claims

Japanese Economy Minister Akira Amari said he would provide an explanation about allegations of financial impropriety to be published in a tabloid magazine article today.
“I want to thoroughly investigate the matter and then fulfill my responsibility to explain myself so as not to arouse suspicions among the public,” Amari told reporters in Tokyo yesterday.
“I personally haven’t done anything that would make the people point at me behind my back.”
The article, to be published in the weekly Shukan Bunshun magazine, says that Amari and his secretary took money from an unnamed Chiba prefecture-based construction company in an alleged violation of a political funding law, according to a summary published on the magazine’s website.
The payments amounted to 12 million yen (MOP830,000), the magazine said, adding that there are no details of them in Amari’s political funding record.
Public broadcaster NHK reported that an unidentified spokesman for the construction company said the article was correct.
Amari, Japan’s point man in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks, spearheads Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s strategy to boost the nation’s competitiveness. If true, the report would be a setback to the government’s bid to pull the world’s third-largest economy out of more than a decade of deflation, and could prove a headache for Abe in the run up to elections this summer. Keiko Ujikane, Maiko Takahashi, Bloomberg