JAPANESE CABINET RESIGNS AFTER MINISTER’S ARREST

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1948, Page 6

JAPANESE CABINET RESIGNS AFTER MINISTER’S ARREST

TOKIO, October 7.

The Japanese Cabinet resigned today after a conference between General MacArthur and the Prime Minister (Mr Ashida). Suehiro Nishio, a former deputy Prime Minister in the present Government of Japan, was arrested yesterday on charges of receiving bribes from the president of the Showa Denko Fertiliser Company as “hush up” campaign funds. Nishio relinquished the deputy Prime Ministership recently when he was charged and subsequently cleared of misappropriating 500,000 yen. . The collapse of Mr Ashida s Cabinet has entirely disrupted the Japanese political situation, according to political observers. With the arrest of Nishio on charges arising from the Showa Denko case, all the major political parties in Japan became involved in the scandal. The Cabinet announced that it accepted moral responsibility for the.Showa Denko bribery scandal, involving loans totalling nearly 3,000,000,000 yen. Japanese-political observers said that every effort would be made in the formation of a new Cabinet to include only those who were free from taint of any suspicion in the Showa Denko scandal or other similar cases involving political corruption.

This is not expected to be easy, as the leading Tokio newspapers predicted today that more politicians of Cabinet or former Cabinet rank faced early arrest. Speculation now centres on the formation of a caretaker Cabinet under .the Speaker of the House of Representatives (Mr Komakichi Matsuoka), which would hold office only until the end of the pending special session of the Diet after which the Diet would dissolve for a General Election.