Police arrested nine people Monday, including board members of Seibu Railway Co., over their suspected involvement in the firm's alleged payoff of a "sokaiya" corporate extortionist to ensure that its shareholders' meetings went smoothly.

The Metropolitan Police Department arrested Seibu's senior managing director, Seiichi Ikura, 65, and five others, including board directors Norihiro Kanno, 59, and Masaru Kojima, 55, on suspicion of paying off well-known sokaiya Ryuga Haga, 74, investigative sources said.

Police suspect that Ikura arranged bargain real estate deals in 2001 via a Seibu Railway subsidiary, enabling the sokaiya and his associates to pocket around 88 million yen.

Police have also obtained an arrest warrant for Haga, who has not yet been arrested because he is hospitalized.

The MPD also arrested an employee at Seibu Railway and two employees at Seibu Real Estate Sales Co., a Seibu Railway affiliate.

The three others who were arrested are Kunihiro Kodama, 66, and Yohei Hayashi, 62, both secretaries to Haga, and 62-year-old real estate agent Takeshi Ujiie.

Following the arrests, Tokyo police raided several locations, including Seibu Railway's head office in Tokorozawa, Saitama Prefecture.

Haga has been linked to other high-profile racketeering cases, including incidents involving Kirin Brewery Co. and department store chain Matsuzakaya Co.

The investigators said Ikura arranged the sales of plots of land owned by Seibu Railway in the cities of Kamakura and Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture to a Yokohama-based real estate company in January and May 2001. Haga served as an adviser to the real estate firm.

The investigators said the land, which totaled some 6,300 sq. meters, was sold for a total of about 112 million yen -- much lower than market prices.

The Yokohama real estate agent immediately sold the land to another real estate firm, making some 88 yen million in profit, the investigators alleged. Haga is suspected of earning several dozen million yen from the deal; the rest of the money was split among the others.

Ikura was quoted by investigators as saying the issue of "selling the land was discussed," while Kodama was quoted by police as saying he was present at the negotiations.

The Yokohama real estate firm purchased shares of Seibu Railway in November 2001. The shares were transferred and placed under Haga's name the following month.

The racketeers then approached Seibu Railway and demanded that it sell the plots at a cheap price as a reward for ensuring shareholders' meetings went off without a hitch, the investigators said.

Police said they suspect the Yokohama real estate agent forged ties with Haga to get its hands on the land cheaply. They said they will send the case on the real estate agent to prosecutors soon.

In a statement, Seibu Railway said it deeply regrets the arrests and vowed to reflect on the gravity of the situation and its social responsibility, and make all-out efforts to prevent such a scandal.

Seibu President Hiroyuki Toda denied that he had personally approved the alleged payoff, insisting he did not believe the real estate deal was "unnatural."

According to Toda, before the land plots in Kanagawa Prefecture were sold to the Yokohama real estate agent, Seibu was having trouble finding buyers because the plots were on sloping ground. The deal with the real estate firm thus appeared to be convenient, he added.

"I have heard that the price for the land plots was determined by considering examples of other (similar land deals), and I don't think the transaction was unnatural," Toda told a news conference. Yet he reiterated he had no further details on the deal "because most of the people involved have been arrested."

Sokaiya hold shares in firms and extort money from them in various ways, such as using embarrassing information to blackmail them and threatening to cause trouble at shareholders' meetings by posing endless questions. Some business managers use sokaiya to quash disruptions at shareholders' meetings by individuals or other groups. Under the Commercial Code, it is illegal to pay off sokaiya.