A third-party panel looking into the piling data scandal at Asahi Kasei Construction Materials Corp. concluded Friday that sloppy management encouraged data manipulation but withheld judgment on whether its workers tried to cover up defects.
The panel's interim report, released Friday, also failed to resolve the long-standing mystery of whether the tilting tower at the Park City Lala Yokohama condominium complex in Tsuzuki Ward, Yokohama, was directly linked to the scandal.
The results released by the three-member panel, which comprises outside lawyers with no interest in the contractor, followed a 2 ½-month investigation that was triggered by the data falsification discovered at the condo. The scandal soon spread nationwide as other piling projects conducted by Asahi Kasei Construction Materials and other firms were found to have similar problems. The cases involved workers doctoring reports to make up for missing or lost data.
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