Your Party chief Yoshimi Watanabe's lame excuse that he borrowed ¥800 million as a "private loan" from a cosmetics firm chairman and spent the money on unspecified nonpolitical expenses only adds to people's distrust of the often opaque sources of funding by politicians.
Watanabe needs to come clean on the matter as a lawmaker who himself has harshly criticized Diet members of other parties for their political funding problems.
The revelation comes on the heels of the case of Naoki Inose, who quit last December as Tokyo governor over the undeclared ¥50 million he received from the Tokushukai hospital operator group in 2012. Inose had insisted that the money was a private loan that he already repaid but admitted last week that the money had in fact been intended for use in his gubernatorial election campaign. The admission came after prosecutors gave him a summary indictment and a summary court fined him ¥500,000 for failing to report the money as required under the Public Offices Election Law.
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