Tokyo: Japanese public prosecutors have questioned three more senior lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on a voluntary basis over a political funds scandal involving the party’s largest faction, people familiar with the matter said Monday.

Investigators from the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office questioned former Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, Tsuyoshi Takagi, former LDP parliamentary affairs chief, and Hiroshige Seko, former secretary-general of the LDP in the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of parliament, all senior members of the faction, the people said.

On Sunday, investigators also questioned former education minister Ryu Shionoya, another senior member of the faction once led by the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on a voluntary basis.

The Abe faction set sales quotas for fundraising party tickets for member lawmakers, and revenues in excess of the quotas were kicked back to the members who sold the tickets, people familiar with the matter said. The kickbacks were allegedly not reported by the faction and the receiving members.

The prosecutors’ office is apparently looking into whether those senior faction members were aware of the practice of creating such slush funds and were involved in the failure to report the money.

Most lawmakers in the Abe faction are believed to have received such slush funds, with the total projected at as much as some 500 million yen over the five years through 2022. More than 10 senior members of the faction, including Matsuno, Takagi and Seko, allegedly received over 10 million yen in such funds each.

The Abe faction’s accountant and some secretaries of member lawmakers have admitted to failing to report such kickbacks in political funds statements, during voluntary questioning by investigators from the prosecutors’ office, according to people familiar with the investigation. The secretaries have said that they were told by the faction not to report the funds, according to the people.

JIJI Press