Politicians serving insurance industry as order-takers

Japan Press Weekly

Japan Press Service Co., Ltd. is the only news agency providing information of progressive, democratic movements in Japan

Politicians serving insurance industry as order-takers

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

Major insurance companies have allegedly put illegal pressures on politicians in order to cover up their failure to pay insurance benefits to their policyholders.

The Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company, headed by the chair of the Life Insurance Association of Japan, paid a total of more than 12 million yen to a number of Dietmembers by purchasing fundraising party tickets from them. The amount of the donation given to each lawmaker was in accordance with a list created by the insurance industry based on the degree of "contribution" they had made to a company: the higher a lawmaker was ranked on the list, the more he/she received.

Major insurers' failure to pay out benefits has surfaced one after another since 2005. In the House of Representatives finance committee in May 2007, the ruling and opposition parties initially agreed to hold a two-and-half-hour session to summon officials from four major insurance firms as unsworn witnesses. However, right before the day set for the summoning, the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party overturned the cross-party agreement and forcibly decided to have only one unsworn witness testify in an abbreviated hour-long session.

If the ruling party lawmakers had distorted the Diet's role in order to meet corporate demands, their actions must be criticized as selling the Diet's administrative investigation right. It has been discovered that unpaid insurance payments amount to 97.3 billion yen involving 1.35 million cases. The Diet is responsible for leading investigations regarding the incident which has undermined a wide range of citizens' interests.

In order to eradicate the root cause of the corruption, corporations and organizations must be banned from making political donations.

- Akahata, August 20, 2010