TOKYO, July 13, 2022—Even Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos cannot pay: The former CEO and three board members of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) July 13 were ordered to pay a record 13.321 trillion yen ($100 billion) by the Tokyo District Court for causing the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown accident that had forced hundreds of thousands of residents’s evacuation and tens of trillions of yen in economic damages to Japanese taxpayers.
The plaintiffs, who were shareholders o TEPCO, are filed for 22 trillion yen ($165 billion) in damages.
In the four separate class-action lawsuits filed by residents near the power plant, the Japanese supreme court in June ruled that TEPCO was exempt from the accident and rejected the plaintiffs’ lawsuit.
In their class-action suit, TEPCO shareholders argued that the accident – flooding of the power reactors and disabling of cooling systems, resulting in radiation leakage – was preventable and happened for TEPCO’s failure to perform due diligence.
The Japanese judiciary has historically made decisions in favor of the state in civil cases. The TEPCO case is expected to go to a high court and eventually to the top court, which traditionally ruled in favor of the state.
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