Farm ministry officials on Monday afternoon questioned executives of Nippon Meat Packers Inc., better known as Nippon Ham, in connection with a beef-mislabeling scam involving one of its subsidiaries.
The questioning of Motoaki Shoji, senior managing director at Nippon Ham, and Heihachiro Azuma, vice president of the company, follows searches carried out on sales offices of Nippon Food Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary, for evidence of abuse of a beef-buyback program to obtain government subsidies.
Azuma serves as president of the subsidiary, which Nippon Ham President Hiroji Okoso has admitted had passed off imported beef as domestic and sold it to the buyback program intended to bail out the domestic cattle industry battered by the outbreak of mad cow disease in Japan last September.