Mainichi
A man known as the loan shark king was sentenced Wednesday to seven years in prison and fined 30 million yen for laundering money and running a lending scheme with exorbitant high interest rates.
The Tokyo District Court found Susumu Kajiyama, a member of the Goryokai group affiliated with Japan's largest organized underworld syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, guilty of illegal lending and money laundering.
Kajiyama, 55, used a network of loan sharks to gain some 23 million yen in interest for loans made by lenders under his umbrella from 2000 to 2003.
Recipients of the loans had to pay interest rates up to several hundred times higher than legal limits in violation of financial investment law.
Kajiyama then laundered some 4.6 billion yen in profits by buying bonds, exchanging them for cash and remitting the money to a Credit Swiss account...the rest...
This editoral from the Asahi sums up how ridiculous this is...
EDITORIAL: When crime does pay
Asahi
Fill a legal loophole to help victims recover damages.
Loan sharks affiliated with Japan's main crime syndicate amassed billions of yen forcibly collected from tens of thousands of debtors. They were arrested and convicted. But here's the rub. Although it sounds unreasonable, the illegally earned profits likely will remain in their hands.
This is because of the way a relevant law on this issue is worded. The government needs to address this loophole.
The Tokyo District Court handed down a seven-year prison sentence Wednesday to Susumu Kajiyama, the so-called ``king of loan sharks.'' Kajiyama, 55, was a leading member of the Goryo-kai, an offshoot of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the nation's largest organized criminal syndicate. He was also fined 30 million yen.
According to the court and investigators, Kajiyama and two co-conspirators, Toshikazu Matsuzaki, 35, and Hirokatsu Okuno, 28, loaned money to people who were already struggling to repay their debts. When debtors fell behind, the loan sharks resorted to intimidating tactics like threatening to harass their employers. They also issued death threats and continued to collect interest at exorbitant rates. On average, the total amount of interest amounted to nearly three times the principal.
The three defendants deposited 5.1 billion yen in Zurich-based Credit Suisse bank and 4.3 billion yen at a Singapore branch of a German bank. They also hid 300 million yen in cash in a safe-deposit box in Tokyo. The court determined the funds constituted illegal profits made through unlawful lending practices.
But it rejected requests by prosecutors to confiscate the funds and collect surcharges....the rest...
