Japan PM cuts pay over meetings

Mr Abe is paid 41.5m yen ($355,000) a year before taxes

Japan's PM Shinzo Abe says he will work unpaid for the next 90 days, after it emerged that officials had paid people to ask questions at public meetings.

The government inquiry also found that at some of the meetings - held over the past five years - officials had pretended to be ordinary people.

Mr Abe, a cabinet minister at the time, was responsible for such meetings.

He said that as a way of assuming responsibility, he would return his salary for the next three months.

The cabinet office investigation said Japan's government under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid member of the public to ask questions to hear what people thought of their policies.

The revelations are embarrassing for the government and Mr Abe, the BBC's Chris Hogg in Tokyo says.

For the cynics who believe that when any politician meets the public it is all stage-managed and choreographed, the news that the Japanese have been doing it will come as no surprise, our correspondent says.

He adds that the events, called town hall meetings, were supposed to be a new, more open forum for discussion between ministers and voters.

High cost

But the inquiry found that officials coached people to make sure they asked ministers what the government wanted them to.

In some cases they actually paid people to question ministers, or pretended to be members of the public and questioned their bosses themselves.

The people in charge focused on the outward appearance rather than the original purpose of the town hall meetings, the inquiry's report said.

It will fan suspicions that public opinion was misled in order to promote government policy, our correspondent says.

But he says the report does not stop there.

The cost of these meetings, more than $188,000 (£95,000) each when they started, was high enough.

But it turns out that, on a number of occasions, officials padded the bills to suggest more government limousines were used than were actually needed to transport the VIPs.