| Analysis |
information exchange allowed? 13,April 1998 |
| Scandals over entertaining officials of the Ministry of Finance or the employees
of the Bank of Japan are becoming larger and large alongside with the arrests
of important figures. On April 10, the Bank of Japan announced the dismissal
of its ninety eight employees who have been entertained by private financial
institutions. However, most of the people who are involved in the scandals cannot understand why they are placed in the current position because entertaining is considered to be the indispensable part of business in order to exchange information between the government authorities and private financial institutions. The fact that a chief of section in the Security Department of the Bank of Japan easily obtained information which would have been only available to the president and provided such information to private financial institutions conveyed the impression to the world that Japan is untrustworthy. Taking responsibility of the scandal,the president of the Bank of Japan resigned and the yen selling was accelerated. Most of the politicians and bureaucrats were convinced that the resignation of the president accelerated the yen selling. However, this is not true. The yen selling was accelerated because markets lost confidence in yen. Markets lost confidence because it became clear to the world that a chief of section of the central bank of Japan, who oversee a huge market, could obtain confidential information and provided such information to private financial institutions Furthermore, we can say that if such information had been provided to a speculator, he or she could have made huge illegal profits in an instance. We can understand from this the implication of this scandal. Most importantly, bureaucrats should not make little of information and should disclose public information decently. In this sense, we need to realize on-line disclosure as soon as possible. In the future, the Laws concerning the Ethics of Public Officials will be enacted. However, its application will be limited. For example, in terms of information exchange, if a government official is transferred as a secretary of a diet member, one of his or her roles is to serve as an intermediary between a diet member and the government officials. In this case, both parties can benefit from information exchange. Therefore, taking into consideration of this trick, we need to consider strict application of the laws. |
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