Police on Wednesday served Katsutoshi Matsuo, a former Foreign Ministry logistics chief, with a new arrest warrant on suspicion of defrauding the government out of roughly 119 million yen.
Matsuo, indicted Friday on charges of defrauding the government out of 42 million yen, is suspected of pocketing the additional 119 million yen by padding accommodation expenses for at least three overseas trips by the late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, police sources said.
The three trips include Obuchi's attendance of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in Malaysia in November 1998, a visit to Russia later that month and his tour of France, Germany and Italy in January 1999, the sources said.