Abe's office suspected of discarding receipts for hotel functions

Why on earth would he have kept the receipts?!

Try looking for the invoices from the other parties. If they are also missing then that tells you all you need to know.

Former prime minister Abe who had disrespected democracy or the Diet repeated innumerable lies and continued to run away from accountability.

IOC gave "Olympic Order" to such a shameless politician.

Old news. This is has been reported and known every year.

And ... nothing has been done.

And ... nothing will be.

I mean, Japan don't mind politicians taking billions in bribes via off shore accounts, stock manipulations, amakudari, etc. Nothing will come of this. It is pretty much an accepted fact that you need to provide favors to government officials if you want a government deal or favorable treatments at this point.

The population will certainly keep voting for their region's political family no matter what,

"Prosecutors have questioned one of Abe's secretaries who heads the supporters' group, a person in charge of accounting at his fund management organization as well as others."

He would become a fall guy.

He would become a fall guy.

Very possible.

One of the person in charge has been mishandling funds... will be the next news.

It’s a bit odd how these allegations only popped up after his resignation and not during his term.

Some mid level salaryman will be forced into suicide...again.

Why ???. he is paying by himself??,out of his own pocket???

As these were dinner parties with alcohol involved, it is perfectly reasonable to use the time-honored excuse "I was drunk so I don't remember."

Lets remember the principles of Justice: innocent until proven guilty. Ex-PM Abe will vigorously defend these tabloid allegations.

Abe told the Diet that documents such as cost estimates and receipts were not issued by the hotels.

Rubbish - that's how they operate and how they get paid!

Also, tax documents need to be kept for 10 years for the NTA audit - ask any company here.

have also found that the amount covered totaled more than 9 million yen over a five-year period through last year, the sources said.

Yesterday, wasn't it 8M, so the amount has increased by 1M, the amount is far highet than what is reported here.

Where’s the problem? The hotel or hotels must also have the same invoice data in their records otherwise they cannot correctly file taxes. Or a private tax filing agency has them and did the tax declaration work for the hotel. And if they did that, also the tax bureau has copies of everything. If still nothing can be found, then all of these three or four places are kind of co-operating criminals. Are you again trying to trick me, you stupid morons?

Opposition parties requested that the hotels reissue the documents but were refused on grounds of "business confidentiality."

Neither Liberal nor Democratic, but sure can Party!

Triples all round!

You can even reconstruct everything if you want. The guests used light, toilet water, amenity sets and so on. The difference to average divided by one usual amount gives the number of additional guests , multiplied with the room rate... Or surely they ate more meat, had more cucumbers in the salads etc., same calculation method here. Finally we can also ask or investigate the delivering suppliers, how much they delivered to the hotel more than usual. Last resort, if they even secretly changed all suppliers for that event, there is much of video footage around and in the hotel. You can therefore at least reconstruct any missing data, coming fairly near to the true values. But only if you want that....lol

The scandal could deal a blow to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who served as chief Cabinet secretary under Abe before replacing him in September.

Yeah, I knew this would be bad for Suga, I just didn’t realize how bad for him it would be. And even know that he was Abe’s right hand man, he was looking to break a little bit from him initially, at least in a few areas. This will definitely set that back quite a bit, at least in terms of image anyway.

@HBJ

Try looking for the invoices from the other parties. If they are also missing then that tells you all you need to know.

They already have; from the article

Opposition parties requested that the hotels reissue the documents but were refused on grounds of "business confidentiality."

I’m an engineer not a lawyer but it would seem they could get a warrant to order release of the documents. The tax invoices must be retained for 7 years so the hotel would have them.

They are certainly acting guilty. I guess we will see how much power the LDP has.

9 million yen over a five year period really doesn’t sound like a truly absurd amount considering

LOL. Why would they want to keep incriminating evidence in the first place? I'm sure they were shredded and disposed of as soon as they got the receipts.

GaijinjlandToday  08:20 am JST

9 million yen over a five year period really doesn’t sound like a truly absurd amount considering

Well? I think that if any normal employee got caught misusing even 9,000 yen they would be in trouble for it. Why shouldn't politicians be held to the same standards as everyone else, no matter how little they spend?