The head of a government-backed Japanese bank said today he would quit in response to an internal probe that found wide-ranging misconduct involving some $2.2 billion in shady loans.
The report alleged that hundreds of employees at almost all of Shoko Chukin Bank's offices across Japan falsified documents to make low-interest loans to firms ineligible to receive them.
The scheme was designed to lend public funds to small and mid-sized companies hurt by the 2008 global financial crisis and Japan's 2011 quake-tsunami disaster.