Japan Press Weekly

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2007 June 13 - 19 [POLITICS]

Politicians, bureaucrats, and businesses must stop sponging off pension premiums: JCP Koike

Japanese Communist Party representative Koike Akira at a House of Councilors Welfare Committee meeting on June 14 criticized the business world, ex-bureaucrats, and the Liberal Democratic Party for benefiting from pension premiums.

The Social Insurance Agency paid a total of 1.4 trillion yen between 1989 and 2005 to NTT Data Corporation and an affiliate of Hitachi, Ltd. for building an online system of the agency, Koike revealed.

He pointed out that expenses for the online system have markedly increased since 1998 when the government began to use pension premiums for the project, compared to the period between 1989 and 1997 when the funding had only come from the national treasury. He argued that a bill to dissolve the Social Insurance Agency would further accelerate such a diversion of the pension premiums.

Koike also revealed that 15 former officials of the Health, Welfare, and Labor Ministry and the Social Insurance Agency had been rehired as executives of the those two companies and their affiliates.

He exposed that since 1998, these companies have made political donations of 227 million yen in total to the LDP’s fund-management organization alone.

“It is unacceptable that companies and bureaucrats are benefiting from the pension project, and that pension premiums are being funneled to the LDP as political donations. Amid mounting public anger over pension mismanagement, this corrupt mechanism still exists. The responsibility of political parties and politicians is called into question,” said Koike. - Akahata, June 15, 2007