Five members of Japan's Fukuoka prefectural assembly attended a luxury dinner in Paris costing 200,000 yen (about 1.8 million won) each and charged the full amount to public funds, fueling a widening controversy over wasteful spending.
Kyodo News reported on the 15th that the five assembly members, including former assembly Speaker Isao Kurauchi, spent a combined 1 million yen in public money on the dinner during a trip to Paris in November last year. The prefecture organized the trip to promote local specialty products, and the dinner was held as a side event to an international food fair.
A total of 25 people, including Governor Seitaro Hattori and Kurauchi, took part in the trip from Nov. 23 to 27 last year, at a total cost of 50.3 million yen. The five assembly members who joined included Nobuaki Matsuo of the Liberal Democratic Party, Kazuyoshi Iwamoto, then a member of the Democratic Kensei prefectural assembly group, Masahiko Shinkai of Komeito, and Norihiro Kabashima of the Shinseikai group. Criticism that the trip amounted to a junket spread after it emerged that the group had enjoyed an extremely expensive dinner on a local government budget.
Hattori attended free of charge as an invited guest, but the prefecture covered the roughly 200,000 yen per person, or 1 million yen in total, for the five assembly members out of public funds. As the controversy grew, some of the lawmakers who attended told reporters they had not known the cost in advance.
Hattori told reporters that a third-party panel would review whether the spending was justified. The prefecture maintains that the expenditure itself was "appropriate," but plans to form a third-party panel soon to reexamine it.
Spending on Hattori's own overseas trips has also come under scrutiny. According to Kyodo News, the prefecture announced on July 14 that there had been 23 overseas trips led by the governor or other officials in the five years since Hattori took office, at a total cost of 337 million yen. Those included a case in which Hattori stayed in a room costing more than 100,000 yen a night on the grounds of hosting a dignitary but did not in fact receive one. At a news conference, the governor said he "regretted not having reviewed the practice."
On July 30, Hattori said the third-party panel's inquiry would cover not only his own overseas travel but also the assembly members' overseas study trips, on the grounds that while the assembly decides who is sent, budget execution falls under the governor's authority. The prefecture had announced on July 24 that it would set up a third-party panel to examine allegations that senior prefectural officials systematically bought tickets to political fundraising parties, as well as the high-cost overseas trips.
