TOKYO, Dec. 27, 2023—The Japanese judiciary Dec. 27, 2023 showed to the public it’s dead set to unearth the political donation scandal of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party by making the first unannounced raid of a lawmaker of the LDP faction of the late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, that’s at the center of investigation.
Japanese television stations Dec. 27 reported Tokyo public prosecutors entering the House of Representative office building and the Nagoya office of Yoshitaka Ikeda, who is a member of the late Abe’s faction for violation of the election financing law. Since the scandal surfaced last month,
the prosecutors have held voluntary interviews of top LDP lawmakers.
Over the past two decades, the Abe faction has been believed setting quotas on its member politicians to sell election funds collection party tickets and ticket proceeds exceeding the quotas have been given to the politicians as funds that did not need to be booked in political funds reports as required by law.
The prosecutors by law are required to report to the minister of justice, the post being held by an LDP lawmaker, so they run the risk of being ordered to discontinue the probe. Yet, they are digging in their heels by taking a lead from U.S. Department of Justice investigators, such as special council Jack Smith, sources explained.
They also theorize that the Japanese investigators fully understand their limit as bureaucrats so want to tell the public that they did their best but could not go beyond.
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