Tokyo Upholds Final Lockheed Guilty Verdicts

A 19-year legal struggle over the biggest scandal to strike post-World War II Japan ended Wednesday when the Supreme Court upheld guilty verdicts against the last two of 16 defendants in the Lockheed bribery case.

The ruling also confirmed the guilt of the late Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka for accepting a $1.8-million Lockheed bribe and brought to 11 the number of Lockheed defendants whose convictions were made final.

Five others, including Tanaka, died during the agonizingly slow trial and appeals process.

So far, no one has been jailed as a result of the verdicts.

Hiro Hiyama, 85--who in 1972 as chairman of Marubeni Corp., a giant trading company, bribed Tanaka with Lockheed’s money--had a two-year, six-month jail sentence confirmed by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

But Japanese law still gives prosecutors the option to forgo imprisoning people older than 70.

Like most of the 11, Toshio Enomoto, 68, Tanaka’s secretary in 1972 whose guilty verdict was also upheld Wednesday, faced only a suspended jail sentence. Others, like Tanaka, who received non-suspended sentences, died while free on bail, awaiting appeals.

Wednesday’s ruling came after more than seven years of hearings in the Supreme Court and 19 years after the Lockheed’s illicit sales of aircraft to All Nippon Airways were exposed in U.S. Senate subcommittee hearings in 1976.

The ruling offered a mixed outlook for future corruption trials.

Judges accepted a broad interpretation of how a politician might misuse his authority in accepting a bribe but ruled as illegal the practice of offering immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony. A deposition given in 1976 by A. Carl Kotchian, former Lockheed vice chairman, was declared inadmissible as evidence.

Despite the involvement of leading politicians and business people and a now-deceased ultra-rightist “political fixer” accused of war crimes, the scandal had surprisingly little impact on either the business or political world.