Japanese police yesterday arrested the head of an asset management company at the center of a scandal that saw the loss of almost US$1.4 billion in pension fund money.
Tokyo Metropolitan Police said it held AIJ Investment Advisers president Kazuhiko Asakawa, 60, and three of his associates on suspicion of swindling ¥7 billion (US$88.6 million) from two retirement funds.
However, the firm’s total losses are said to top ¥109 billion.
The three men and a woman “conspired to defraud cash in the name of pension fund management” and lied in June and July last year by saying the retirement assets had steadily risen in value when, in reality, they had tumbled, a police spokesman said.
Earlier yesterday, authorities reportedly raided the company’s Tokyo headquarters while questioning Asakawa, who has publicly admitted he inflated investment returns, but denied that he tried to deceive clients.
“I didn’t want to use inflated figures for the pensions fund, but [I did because] I did not want to come back with losses, no matter what,” he told a parliamentary panel investigating the matter earlier this year. “I was confident of recouping the losses.”
AIJ’s operations were suspended in February in a scandal that has rocked Japan.
The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has said AIJ, which managed ¥145 billion in retirement funds, lost at least ¥109.0 billion in an alleged fraud that reportedly affects more than 880,000 policy holders.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained