Prosecutors officially accepted on Wednesday a criminal complaint filed by the Osaka prefectural government against the scandal-hit school operator Moritomo Gakuen over using fraudulent means to obtain government subsidies.
According to the complaint filed with the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office, Tsukamoto Kindergarten, run by Moritomo Gakuen, allegedly swindled the prefectural government out of subsidies totaling some 61.86 million yen (about 0.56 million U.S. dollars) over the past six years.
The complaint alleged that Yasunori Kagoike, head of Moritomo Gakuen, inflated the number of full-time faculty and staff of the kindergarten and the number of children with disabilities to get subsidies from the local government.
Tsukamoto Kindergarten and its operator Moritomo Gakuen have been under public scrutiny, first for the school's nationalist agenda, and later for a shady land deal scandal implicating Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Tsukamoto kindergarten, which has been visited by Abe's wife Akie Abe, has been exposed for requiring 3- to 5-year-old students to recite in stilted Japanese the pre-war Imperial Rescript on Education that helped fuel Japanese militarism before and during World War II.
Moritomo Gakuen reportedly bought a 8,770-square-meter piece of land last June in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, for 134 million yen, equivalent to only 14 percent of its appraisal price, for building a new elementary school with Akie Abe as its honorary principal.
Yasunori Kagoike, head of the school operator, gave sworn testimony in both chambers of parliament stating he thinks the land deal involved "politicians' intervention," while the Abes, for their part, denied involvement in the land deal.
Public opinion polls showed that the majority of the Japanese people consider the Abe administration not doing enough to clear away suspicions surrounding the scandal.
