Japanese businessman jailed for 15 years for defrauding Lehman Brothers

Tokyo, Sept. 14 Kyodo - A Tokyo court sentenced a former president of a medical consulting company to 15 years in prison and 5 million yen in fines on Monday for conspiracy in defrauding a Japanese unit of failed Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. using fabricated documents of Japanese trading company Marubeni Corp.

The Tokyo District Court found Shigenori Saito, 47, who was president of Asclepius Ltd., guilty of conspiring to deceive the Japanese arm of the now-defunct US securities company into investing 37.1 billion yen in bogus hospital restructuring projects between August and November in 2007. The punishment given by the court was in line with what the prosecutors have sought.

Presiding Judge Osamu Iguchi said Saito played an "integral part in the crime by telling his accomplices to forge documents" that carried the letterhead of a Marubeni vice-president. His conspirators included former Marubeni employee Yuzuru Yamanaka, 36, who has been indicted on fraud and other charges.

Saito was also ordered to pay a surcharge of some 412 million yen, the same amount of money he earned in March last year in insider trading, the court said.

He made the profit by selling off a total of 11,500 shares in LTT Bio-Pharma Co., the parent company of Saito's firm, before disclosing that his company had become unable to reimburse investors for contributions they made to its capital and that it was withdrawing from a capital tie-up with the parent firm, it said.

Source: Kyodo News Service, Tokyo, in English 1022 gmt 14 Sep 09

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