Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday remained steadfast that he and his wife were not involved in a discount land-sale deal that has seen the opposition call for the resignation of key ally and Finance Minister Taro Aso.<\/p>\n
Abe and Aso have come under fresh pressure over the ministry\u2019s admission this week that it had altered documents related to the sale of state-owned land at a steep discount to a school operator with ties to Abe\u2019s wife, Akie.<\/p>\n
Suspicion of a cover-up could slash Abe\u2019s ratings and dash his hopes for a third term as leader of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Victory in the LDP September leadership vote would put him on track to become Japan\u2019s longest-serving premier.<\/p>\n
Copies of documents released by the finance ministry on Monday showed that references to Abe, his wife and Aso were removed from the ministry\u2019s records of the sale to school operator Moritomo Gakuen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you look at the documents even before they were altered, it is clear that my wife and I were not involved,\u201d Abe told an upper house budget committee on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Abe has said he would resign if evidence were found that they had.<\/p>\n
According to the ministry documents, a comment from Moritomo Gakuen citing Akie Abe as telling him, \u201cThis is good land so please proceed,\u201d was removed. Yasunori<\/p>\n
Kagoike, the former head of Moritomo Gakuen, and his wife remain in custody after being arrested last July over the deal.<\/p>\n
Asked about the reference on Wednesday, Abe said: \u201cI checked with my wife and she says she said no such thing. My wife was neither the person in charge of establishing the school nor Mr Kagoike\u2019s boss, so naturally she would not have made such a remark.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday remained steadfast that he and his wife were not involved in a discount land-sale deal that has seen the opposition call for the resignation of key ally and Finance Minister Taro Aso. Abe and Aso have come under fresh pressure over the ministry\u2019s admission this week that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24767,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24768,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24766\/revisions\/24768"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}