The Tokyo District Court on Monday accepted a bankruptcy petition filed by a building design office involved in the designing of several hotels whose quake-proof specifications were falsified by a disgraced architect, the design office said.
According to a lawyer for Heisei Sekkei design office, it has applied for court protection from 55 creditors with an estimated 637 million yen in debts.
Tokyo-based Heisei Sekkei is affiliated with Kimura Construction Co., a construction firm based in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto Prefecture, which built many properties whose quake-proof data were fabricated by the architect, Hidetsugu Aneha.
Kimura Construction went bankrupt shortly after the building-code scandal was unearthed in mid-November.
Aneha was using business cards with the name Heisei Sekkei printed on them when working on the hotels designed by the design office. Aneha had operated his own office in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, but the Chiba Prefectural Government removed his office from the list of authorized architect's offices following revelations of the scandal.
Heisei Sekkei suspended operations Nov. 21 when Kimura Construction's bills were dishonored and it dismissed all employees Nov. 25.
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