Former senior Defense Facilities Administration Agency officials who worked for midsize contractors after retirement allegedly compiled a list detailing the combination of construction consortiums that would land a project at a U.S. base in Yamaguchi Prefecture, investigation sources said Wednesday.
The former officials as well as a former senior official at Obayashi Corp., a general contractor, made modifications to the combination in line with requests by local companies suspected of rigging bids for the work, the sources said. The project, to relocate a runway at Iwakuni Air Station, was ordered by the agency.
The former officials held the post of technical councilor, the third-highest rank at the agency.
The officials are also suspected of compiling a separate list of companies that would win bids for the project.
They allegedly organized secret job arrangements for the contractors starting in 1996 when the first tender for the project was invited.
On Tuesday, prosecutors served fresh arrest warrants on three current and former agency officials on suspicion of leading bid-rigging in the base relocation project.
The move came a day after the three men -- Takayoshi Kawano, 57, a former technical councilor at the agency, Mamoru Ikezawa, 57, who was Kawano's predecessor, and Takashige Matsuda, 53, an official in the agency's general affairs department -- were indicted for playing leading roles in rigging bids for tenders for air-conditioning projects ordered by the agency.
The total cost for the Iwakuni Air Station project was about 240 billion yen, and the three were allegedly involved in making arrangements for three projects including reclamation work whose costs ranged from about 2.15 billion yen to 4.87 billion yen.