OSAKA -- The Osaka High Court handed down a suspended prison term Thursday to Yoshihiro Mita, 61, former president of failed photocopier maker Mita Industrial Co., for damaging the firm by falsifying financial reports and bribing an auditor.
The high court thus scrapped a November 1999 Osaka District Court-imposed prison sentence of two years and eight months. Mita was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for four years.
Presiding Judge Hiromu Kurihara said Mita bears grave responsibility for aggravated breach of trust, bribery and giving illegal dividends to shareholders after falsifying the firm's earning reports.
But the judge also told the court that Mita had applied for the firm to be administered under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law in a timely fashion and that the rehabilitation process has been going smoothly.
The judge also said Mita offered all his assets to help the company pay off its debts and stayed in the detention house without demanding bail.
"Mita has been doing sincere soul-searching for what he did," the judge said.
Mita Industrial went under in August 1998 as its business performance deteriorated. It was renamed Kyocera Mita Co. in January, when it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Kyoto-based Kyocera Corp. as a means of rehabilitation.
Mita, who had since 1979 served as president of the Osaka-based company founded by his father in 1948, damaged it by paying 140 million yen in bonuses to executives, including himself, for five years up to 1997, even though it had not turned a profit, according to the court.
He also conspired with a former auditor and former Mita executives to unlawfully pay 1.13 billion yen in dividends.
to shareholders, including his relatives and himself, over the same period, the court said. Mita also gave the auditor about 30 million yen in bribes between 1994 and 1998 to overlook the falsified reports, it said.