The Yomiuri Shimbun said in a news report posted on its site at the-japan-news.com that JTC President Tamio Kakinuma admitted his firm had given kickbacks to civil servants in Vietnam, Indonesia and Uzbekistan to win contracts for ODA projects there.
Kakinuma “admitted the allegations during questioning by the special investigation squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office,” the news report quoted informed sources as saying.
The report said he had not been aware of those kickbacks.
The Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau discovered JTC’s illegal payments amounting to about 130 million yen during a tax inspection, including 80 million yen paid for the Vietnam Railways official to secure an ODA project contract valued at 4.2 billion yen, according to the report. These illegal payments were made between February 2008 to February 2014.
Leading Vietnamese news site VnExpress.net quoted Tran Ngoc Thanh, chairman of Vietnam Railways Corporation, as saying that he had heard news about the kickbacks made by JTC and that the corporation had been verifying the information and had ordered the agencies concerned to report on the matter.
“On the morning of March 23, we called a meeting to hear reports and set up an independent inspection team,” Thanh told the news site, adding this is a sensitive issue, and that the Japanese side had neither informed Vietnam nor requested a coordination for investigation. However, he said, the Vietnamese side would be reviewing all the projects with JTC involvement.
The Ministry of Transport decided on March 23 to suspend the director of the railway project management unit at Vietnam Railways Corporation, Nguyen Van Hieu, for 15 days so that he could have time to explain the bribery allegations.
Đăng ký: VietNam News
