Japan Financial Aide Quits in Scandal : Government: A top assistant to Finance Minister Hashimoto resigns over questionable loans. Hashimoto himself considers stepping down.

A top aide to Finance Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto resigned Saturday after admitting he helped arrange $9.3 million in questionable loans. Hashimoto, Japan’s highest economic official, is also said to be considering resigning.

Hashimoto, often mentioned as a likely future candidate for prime minister, already has been under pressure to step down because of his ministry’s handling of another scandal involving stock brokerages.

Kyodo News Service quoted Hashimoto as telling an unidentified high governing party official, “I’d like to consider my resignation after putting in place measures for preventing a recurrence of the securities scandal.”

Opposition parties are expected to make Hashimoto’s status a major issue in a parliamentary session that begins Monday.

“I am also responsible for this oversight,” Hashimoto told a hastily called news conference Saturday on the questionable loans. “I feel my responsibility deeply.”

The Asahi newspaper and others have urged him to resign.

The news conference was called after another newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun, reported Saturday that the aide, Toyoki Kobayashi, helped arrange dubious bank loans for three of Hashimoto’s associates.

Finance Ministry officials said Hashimoto had accepted Kobayashi’s resignation. Kobayashi, 50, had been manager of Hashimoto’s Tokyo office.

Kobayashi told the news conference that he had been asked by several people to help arrange loans and that he had introduced them to Minoru Nakamura, an official at the Fuji Bank’s Akasaka branch. He said he was not aware until Friday that the loans had been handled illegally.

News reports said three people referred by Kobayashi received loans totaling $9.3 million through use of falsified certificates of deposit.

Last month, Fuji Bank dismissed Nakamura, 38, and two other officials who it said issued fraudulent certificates of deposit worth $1.89 billion for 23 companies to use as collateral for loans. Many of the companies reportedly were involved in real estate speculation.

Lawmakers in a parliamentary committee quizzed Hashimoto on Friday about the stock brokerage scandal, which involves 17 large and medium-size securities firms that paid favored clients a total of $1.3 billion to cover stock trading losses. An undisclosed number of smaller firms have also admitted to Finance Ministry investigators that they provided compensation.