A former president of a medical consulting company was sentenced Monday to 15 years in prison and fined ¥5 million for conspiracy by defrauding a Japanese unit of failed Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. using fabricated Marubeni Corp. documents.
The Tokyo District Court found Shigenori Saito, 47, who was president of Asclepius Ltd., guilty of conspiring to deceive the Japanese arm of the now-defunct U.S. securities company into investing ¥37.1 billion in bogus hospital restructuring projects between August and November 2007. The punishment was in line with the prosecutors' demands.
Presiding Judge Osamu Iguchi said Saito played an "integral part in the crime by telling his accomplices to forge documents" that carried the letterhead of a Marubeni vice president. His conspirators included former Marubeni employee Yuzuru Yamanaka, 36, who has been indicted for fraud and other charges.
Saito was also ordered to pay a surcharge of some ¥412 million, the same amount of money he earned in March 2008 through insider trading, the court said.
He made the profit by selling off 11,500 shares in LTT Bio-Pharma Co., the parent company of Saito's firm, before disclosing that his company had become unable to reimburse investors for contributions they made to its capital and that it was withdrawing from a capital tieup with the parent firm, the court ruled.