Ex-Tokyo Olympics official pleads not responsible to taking bribes in trade for Games contracts
TOKYO — Haruyuki Takahashi, a former member of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, appeared in district courtroom on Thursday and pleaded not responsible to taking bribes tied to the Games.
Takahashi was arrested greater than a yr in the past and it’s unclear when his trial will finish.
The protection will current its case early subsequent yr.
A former government with the highly effective Japanese promoting firm Dentsu, Takahashi is charged with accepting round 198 million yen ($1.4 million) in bribes in trade for awarding Olympic contracts for the Tokyo Games in 2021.
Takahashi appeared in courtroom simply 9 days after a separate bid-rigging trial was adjourned with Dentsu and 5 different corporations dealing with legal expenses. That trial is to renew early subsequent yr.
“I assert my innocence on all the charges,” Takahashi, carrying a grey swimsuit and burgundy tie, informed the decide earlier than the prosecution offered its case. “It was strictly business and it was not a bribe.”
The indictment says Takahashi obtained bribes from enterprise swimsuit retailer Aoki Holdings, writer Kadokawa and others. Sun Arrow, one of many corporations implicated, produced the stuffed toy model of the Olympic mascot, Miraitowa, and Paralympic model, Someity.
About a dozen individuals have already been convicted in associated bribery instances, however all have obtained suspended sentences.
The myriad corruption investigations across the Tokyo Olympics are the most recent to soil latest Games. French investigators have subsequent yr’s Paris Olympics below scrutiny over how contracts are awarded.
Though the Olympics are funded partly by non-public cash, additionally they rely closely on taxpayer funding. In the case of Tokyo, at the least 50% was public cash. Tokyo says it formally spent $13 billion on the Tokyo Games, however a authorities audit says it is perhaps twice that a lot.
Reports of corruption within the Tokyo Olympics stretch again to at the least 2013 when the International Olympic Committee voted to award the Games to the Japanese capital. French prosecutors have regarded into allegations that some International Olympic Committee members had been bribed to vote for Tokyo.
That scandal additionally compelled the resignation in 2019 of Japanese Olympic Committee head Tsunekazu Takeda, who was additionally an IOC member and the top of its advertising division.
As the Tokyo Olympics have been mired in controversy from the start, the scandals have value the northern metropolis of Sapporo a powerful probability to carry the 2030 Winter Olympics.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who headed the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, was compelled to step down after making derogatory feedback about ladies.
The Games additionally allowed the Tokyo metropolis authorities to make zoning adjustments to assemble the National Stadium. Those zoning adjustments jeopardize a park known as Jingu Gaien close to the stadium, the place developer Mitsui Fudosan has a controversial plan to construct three skyscrapers and lower hundreds or timber within the park house.
