Welfare official gets suspended term for postal system abuse

OSAKA — A welfare ministry section chief was sentenced to a suspended one-year prison term Monday for forging documents in an effort to abuse a postal system discount in a case that saw his former boss acquitted in 2010 and a prosecutor convicted of evidence-tampering.

Tsutomu Kamimura

Former bureaucrat Tsutomu Kamimura, 42, used the official seal of his boss at the time, Atsuko Muraki, 56, to forge a document certifying a fictitious entity as a group working on behalf of disabled people in 2004, making it eligible for postage discounts for the handicapped, the Osaka District Court ruled.

Muraki was acquitted but her trial led to the conviction of Tsunehiko Maeda, the prosecutor in charge of investigating the case, for evidence-tampering. Maeda's two bosses at the time are still on trial in connection with the evidence-tampering.

In ruling in Kamimura's trial, presiding Judge Hiroyuki Nakagawa accused prosecutors of continuing the trials over the postal case without notifying the defense of the evidence-tampering that senior prosecutors were believed aware of in early 2010.

Kamimura was charged in July 2009 as Muraki's alleged accomplice. His council has argued that the indictment was illegal on the grounds that it was used in a bid to convict Muraki, then a senior official at the health ministry, but admitted that Kamimura perpetrated the document forgery in the postal discount scam.

The judge said the indictment was unfair but neither illegal nor invalid, noting the prosecution had other evidence to suspect the two officials conspired in the case.