The personal information of 169 customers who each have over ¥100 million deposited in the Bank of Saga was likely stolen by a former employee and handed to a group of suspected criminals, bank officials said Monday.

The former employee, Atsushi Yoshida, 42, is on trial over a separate theft but was found to have conducted database searches for the information in question, which he later copied illegally.

Yoshida allegedly handed the information to members of a group who were arrested for robberies at Saga Bank's branches last year in the city of Fukuoka.