Goodwill Group Inc. announced Wednesday it will sell all of its nursing-care operations, including those of scandal-hit Comsn Inc., as early as next April.
Goodwill made the announcement after a board meeting. It said its six nursing-care firms would continue to operate until the end of next March in order to not inconvenience clients. Goodwill said it has decided to sell to take responsibility for Comsn's certification fraud.
Goodwill will look for a buyer "as soon as possible" and will make one of the conditions of the Comsn sale that its workforce of around 2,400 be retained.
Meanwhile, Comsn President Koichi Higuchi also told the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare that the company's entire operations will be sold to a company outside the Goodwill group.
"Selling the operations to a single company would be best," Higuchi told a news conference, following a meeting with Shinji Asonuma, head of the ministry's health and welfare bureau for the elderly.
Goodwill's decision to retreat from nursing care follows the ministry's announcement last week that it will not renew the operating licenses of nearly 80 percent of the nursing facilities run by Comsn. The licenses will start expiring at the end of Comsn's business year next March.
The firm obtained some of the government licenses for its nursing-care operators by lying on the applications, including inflating the number of employees, the ministry said.
The decision to end the licenses is a big problem for the nation as it affects about 1,600 facilities that serve around 60,000 elderly people.
Comsn operates about 2,000 nursing-care facilities nationwide, of which about 30 are permanent homes and the rest are seniors' day-care facilities. Its home-care business is the biggest in Japan.
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