The Financial Services Agency may file criminal charges against a firm that falsely claimed it bought control of some of the nation's biggest companies, including Sony Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp.
"We'll decide after taking into consideration the intent," Yoshimi Watanabe, minister for financial services, said Tuesday. The government will set up a system to weed out false information automatically, he said.
The FSA on Sunday ordered unlisted Teramento Corp. to correct ¥20 trillion in filings that said it had acquired majority stakes in Toyota, Sony and NTT among others. All companies either denied the transactions or said they had no knowledge of them.
Teramento President Shigeru Yamaguchi failed to correct the filings by Monday evening as ordered by the FSA. Yamaguchi said in a phone interview Tuesday that he won't change the filings.