About 10 senior bureaucrats from the Foreign Ministry stayed at a luxury Tokyo hotel and made a lower-ranking official, who is now under arrest, pay their bills with public money he had pooled, police sources said Saturday.
The bureaucrats include senior officials up to bureau chief level. They left the accommodation bill at the Hotel New Otani to Akio Asakawa, 56, a former assistant director in the First West Europe Division of the ministry's European Affairs Bureau.
Asakawa was arrested Thursday with two Hotel New Otani officials for allegedly defrauding the state out of some 423 million yen in March 1996 by padding hotel bills for international conferences.