OSAKA — Prosecutors demanded a 10-year prison term Thursday for a former branch manager of Daiwa Securities Co. who is accused of defrauding clients out of some 4.2 billion yen by luring them into fabricated investment schemes.
The prosecutors told the Osaka District Court that the accused, Hirotsugu Shibuya, 57, committed a "vicious crime that made maximum use of his position and special knowledge as a senior official of a securities company, and the damage was enormous."
Prosecutors allege that Shibuya, who successively held the post of manager at Daiwa's branch offices in Nara, Niigata and Umeda, Osaka Prefecture, swindled 2 billion yen from his former clients and the president of a metal company in Higashi Osaka with a false investment scheme between February and August 1997 while serving as an executive of a Daiwa subsidiary.
Shibuya also swindled 1.855 billion yen from the president of a construction company in Nara, 100 million yen from a woman in Kobe and 200 million yen from the president of a construction company in Niigata Prefecture in the same way, prosecutors said.
Shibuya denied the charges at the first hearing in his trial, but later pleaded guilty.