The Tokyo District Court rejected on Friday a lawsuit seeking to force Gov. Yukio Aoshima and other Tokyo municipal officials to make public all documents on entertainment expenses.
Presiding Judge Kaoru Aoyagi ruled that because documents in question were discarded after the three-year preservation period ran out, it is now impossible to make them public. The lawsuit was filed by Yuichi Goto, 48, a representative of a Tokyo citizens' group.
Aoyagi said the government should have anticipated such lawsuits, and discarding the documents was a questionable act. As a result, he ordered the municipal government to cover all court expenses concerning the lawsuit. In such lawsuits, the loser usually has to pay all court expenses.
According to the ruling, Goto asked the Tokyo government on March 27 to make public all entertainment costs for fiscal 1992 in accordance with the Tokyo Information Disclosure Ordinance. The government informed him that it was unable to show some of the documents.
Goto filed the lawsuit in August 1996 seeking a court order challenging this decision. Under document management regulations for the municipal government, documents whose preservation periods have expired must be discarded.
The preservation period for the documents sought by Goto expired on March 31, 1996. Goto asked for the documents just before the expiration date, so the Tokyo government temporarily retained them and only discarded them after it decided not to make them public.
After filing the lawsuit, Goto said that in accordance with the Administrative Litigation Law, he took the legal action within three months after the government decided not to make the documents public. He charged the local government with trying to cover up improper accounting of entertainment expenses by discarding the documents without waiting for the expiration of the three-month period.