The newspaper reports that Shigeru Echigo, a 37-year-old former executive in Deutsche’s now-defunct pensions solutions department, said at the start of his trial on Tuesday that he did not act alone when he spent about Y900,000 ($8,800) on 15 separate occasions to entertain an executive at the retirement fund of Mitsui Group.
According to an account of the court hearing from Bloomberg, Echigo said his spending between April and December 2012 was “part of systematic conduct based on the instructions and consent of…bosses” at the German bank’s Japan brokerage unit.
In December, the bank closed its Pension Solution Department, which is concerned in the trial, after an investigation by the Financial Services Agency (the Japanese regulator) found it had provided officers of three employees’ pension funds with “substantial benefits”, including gifts and entertainments, totalling Y6.3m over three years.
Following the scandal, the bank closed the unit and has docked the pay of Makoto Kuwahara, its country head, by 20% for six months.
