A close aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last year urged the then-top education ministry bureaucrat to push forward the procedure for the opening of a veterinary medicine school, the bureaucrat said Tuesday.

The approval of the school, operated by a close friend of Abe, is at the center of influence-peddling allegations involving the Prime Minister's Office.

Hiroto Izumi, special adviser to Abe, repeatedly summoned Kihei Maekawa, then the vice education minister, to the Prime Minister's Office, urging efforts to approve the department in a specially designated deregulation zone, a government source said on the same day.