Tokyo, December 03: Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and his brother haven’t agreed on much since going separate ways in politics, but they have one thing in common: both say they were in the dark about a recent funding scandal.
“The news hit me like a bolt from the blue,” Kunio Hatoyama, a veteran lawmaker in the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, said this week after media reports that he had received tons of cash from his mother without proper accounting.
Elder brother Yukio has been plagued by similar reports in recent weeks, but the doubts about his sibling could make it harder for the opposition to push their attack.
The prime minister, who has also said he knew nothing about receiving cash from his wealthy mother, a daughter of the founder of tyre maker Bridgestone Corp, has been under pressure to explain more about the funding scandal, which has dogged him since before his Democratic Party toppled the LDP in an August election.
In a public opinion poll published by Kyodo news agency on Sunday, 74 percent of voters said they were not satisfied with the premier’s explanation. Only 11 percent, however, said he should resign over the matter.
A former aide to Yukio Hatoyama, suspected of having altered records to make cash funnelled from Hatoyama’s family fortune look like donations from individuals, may be charged in the case, media said, a development that could hurt the government ahead of an election for parliament’s upper house in mid-2010.
But prosecutors will not seek to question the premier directly about suspected falsification of his political funding records, Japanese media reported on Wednesday.
Both Yukio and Kunio began their careers in the LDP but bolted the then-ruling party as part of a rebellion that helped to briefly oust it. But they parted ways when Kunio left the Democratic Party in 1999, returning to the LDP the following year.
—Agencies