The Tokyo District Court sentenced former Finance Ministry bureaucrat Takashi Sakakibara to a suspended two-year prison term Friday for accepting bribes worth 3.42 million yen from brokerages and a major bank.
Sakakibara, 39, former deputy director of the Securities Bureau's general affairs section, was found guilty of receiving the bribes in the form of wining and dining as a reward for granting the financial institutions favors. e was ordered by the court to pay 3.37 million yen in fines.
Sakakibara is the last of four former ministry officials to be convicted and given a suspended sentence in the bribery case.
According to the court, Sakakibara, who was fired in July, received the bribes between 1993 and 1997 on 62 occasions, in such forms as golf outings, gift coupons and entertainment at restaurants in Tokyo and Paris. He was wined and dined by Nomura Securities Co. on 28 occasions, to the tune of about 1.8 million yen, by Daiwa Securities Co. on six occasions for 377,000 yen and by Nikko Securities Co. on nine occasions for 449,000 yen.
The now defunct Yamaichi Securities Co. also paid a total of 368,000 yen on five occasions and Sumitomo Bank wined and dined him on 14 occasions at a total cost of about 423,000 yen, according to the court. In return, Sakakibara favored the four brokerages by working for earlier introduction of a cumulative stock investment program that they had hoped to introduce at the time and used his influence to help get early approval of a new financial product for Nomura, the court said.