Japan's Recruit publisher guilty

Japan's Recruit publisher guilty

The scandal led to the collapse of Noboru Takeshita's government

A Japanese court has given a suspended jail term to a former company chairman convicted of a massive political bribery scandal which brought down the government in the late 1980s.

Hiromasa Ezoe, the 66-year-old former chairman of publishers Recruit Co Ltd, was given a three-year prison sentence suspended for five years.

It finally brings down the curtain on more than 13 years of hearings into a stocks-for-favours scandal that epitomised Japan's speculative "bubble economy" of the period.

Ezoe was convicted of bribing politicians, bureaucrats and business executives by offering them shares in his company's real estate subsidiary, Recruit Cosmos Co. Ltd., before the firm went public.

The shares almost doubled their initial asking price when they debuted on Japan's then-massively overheated stock market in October 1986, giving the recipients fat profits.

The 11 people implicated alongside Ezoe, who was arrested in early 1989, included chief cabinet secretary Takao Fujinami, the top civil servants in the labour and education ministries and the then-head of Japanese telecoms giant NTT.

The scandal led to the resignation of Kiichi Miyazawa as finance minister in 1988 and the downfall of the entire government of Noboru Takeshita the following year.

Takeshita himself was suspected of having received massive amounts from Recruit, but managed to keep considerable behind-the-scenes influence in politics in retirement. He died in 2000.