Police on Wednesday raided yakuza offices in Tokyo and Fukuoka to look for evidence that more than half of some 2.8 billion yen worth of client stocks embezzled by the former president of the now defunct Minami Securities Co. had been transferred to the underworld.

Police raided the offices of a gangland group affiliated with the Dojinkai syndicate, and plan to determine how some 1.5 billion yen in stocks were handed over to the group, they said.

Koichi Hirata, 37, became president of Minami Securities, based in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, in June 1999. An investigation showed he borrowed 200 million yen from a member of the underworld group, promising to return 300 million yen, because the company was in financial difficulty.

But Hirata allegedly was unable to repay the money and instead conspired with an executive at Minami Securities and a securities broker to embezzle client stocks and sell them to pay back the loans and to make a profit for themselves.

Around March 6, 2000, the three entered one of the annexes of Minami Securities' Tokyo branch office and ran off with 2.8 billion yen worth of stocks belonging to around 810 clients, according to the investigations. About 1.5 billion yen worth of the embezzled stocks was transferred to the gangster group.

Minami Securities, set up in 1960, suffered from the collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s. The brokerage was declared bankrupt by the Tokyo District Court on March 21, 2000.