OSAKA -- The president and founder of Asahi Juken, an Osaka housing company, was arrested Tuesday in connection with an alleged conspiracy by the firm to defraud creditors out of 600 million yen.
The arrest of Kizo Matsumoto, 62, follows the interrogation and release of Asahi Juken's accounting chief and other officers of the firm. A special Osaka Prefectural Police squad issued the warrant for Matsumoto.
Accounting chief Yuki Norimori bilked creditors by presenting them with bogus security property sales contracts at undervalued prices, police sources alleged.
Police suspect that the company, which borrowed heavily from housing loan companies, pocketed about 10 billion yen by underestimating the sales prices of properties used for securities.
According to police probes, Asahi Juken in June 1996 sold a property for about 2.7 billion yen to a home appliance company in Hyogo Prefecture for which life insurance companies and other creditors had a mortgage of 14 billion yen.
Asahi Juken drew up a false sales contract that set the property sales price at about 2 billion yen, the sources said. The company paid about 2.1 billion yen to the life insurance companies and had them renounce their security rights on the property, allegedly pocketing the remaining 600 million yen in the process, the sources alleged.