The Osaka Prefectural Government announced Thursday that staff from the Finance Ministry's Kinki Local Finance Bureau met with its officials five times over 16 months to discuss scandal-plagued Moritomo Gakuen's application to open a new elementary school, placing pressure on officials in the final meeting to settle things quickly.
The announcement came after a weeks-long investigation by the prefecture into whether Moritomo Gakuen received preferential treatment. The opening of the school has been indefinitely postponed by a scandal in which the private school operator, which advocates a nationalistic education, received a suspiciously large discount on a piece of government property.
Yasunori Kagoike, who was head of Moritomo Gakuen at the time of the land purchase, is also under investigation for submitting different construction cost estimates to the prefecture, the central government and the original owner of the parcel purchased for the new school in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture.