Japan PM hit by widening fund scandal

I / Tokyo December 24, 2009, 16:50 IST

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's fledgling government was shaken by a growing funds scandal today as a former aide was charged with misreporting millions of dollars of donations.

The indictment caps a difficult first 100 days in office for the political blue-blood, whose August election victory ended more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule in the world's number two economy.

The former aide, Keiji Katsuba, was charged with falsifying reports to make it seem that 360 million yen ($3.9 million) provided by Hatoyama and his mother were donated by individual supporters, public broadcaster NHK said.

Hatoyama's former chief accountant Daisuke Haga meanwhile was ordered by the Tokyo Summary Court to pay a fine of 300,000 yen for failing to pay sufficient attention to the reports, the Jiji Press news agency reported.

But prosecutors decided not to indict Hatoyama due to a lack of evidence that he was involved in any wrongdoing, the reports said. There was no immediate confirmation of the indictments by prosecutors.

In June, when he was still opposition leader, Hatoyama admitted to sloppy account-keeping by his fund-raising body, which had listed the names of dead donors as well as people who later denied giving money.