The sacked Foreign Ministry logistics chief suspected of embezzlement and inflating expenses for overseas trips by prime ministers submitted a receipt for a hotel stay for a night when a prime ministerial entourage was aboard an airplane, ministry sources said Friday.
Katsutoshi Matsuo, 55, claimed that on Nov. 13, 1998, the 80-member delegation of the late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi stayed in St. Petersburg, during Obuchi's Russia visit, when in fact the delegation returned to Tokyo that night, the sources said.
Obuchi met then Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Nov. 12 in the first official visit by a Japanese prime minister to Russia since 1973. The officials accompanying Obuchi stayed at a hotel in Moscow on Nov. 11 and 12.