The government needs to fully account for the problems in its sale of a tract of public land in Osaka Prefecture to school operator Moritomo Gakuen, now that the Board of Audit has concluded that the plot was sold at a steep discount based on faulty estimates of the amount of industrial waste that needs to be removed from the site. It must take the report by the government watchdog seriously since it concerns the sale of state-owned property at a price far below its fair value.
The report released last Wednesday by the Board of Audit does not delve into why the questionable discount was offered to the school operator. Suspicions that the steep discount was offered in view of the close ties between the head of Moritomo Gakuen and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wife, Akie, who served as honorary principal of a new school that was to be built on the site, have not been dispelled. It is not within the watchdog's power to investigate what lay behind the shady transaction. It's the duty of the Abe administration to investigate and publicly explain why the deal went down the way it did.
Moritomo Gakuen signed a contract with the government in May 2015 to lease the 8,770-sq.-meter plot in the city of Toyonaka for the construction of a new elementary school. In March last year, the school operator told the Finance Ministry, which takes charge of transactions of state-owned land, that it found the waste buried underground during construction work, and offered to buy the land outright. The Finance Ministry then requested the land ministry, which owned the plot, to estimate the amount of waste and calculate the cost of removing it from the site.