FORMER GOLD FIRM EXECUTIVES ARRESTED IN JAPAN
The public prosecutors and police
here arrested five former senior executives of a bankrupt gold
deposit business group for defrauding about 450 clients of
about 1.5 billion yen for gold bars which were never delivered,
police said.
    The case involving the Toyota Shoji Company was highlighted
when its 32-year-old Chairman Kazuo Nagano was stabbed to death
here in public view in June, 1985.
    Television crews which had been waiting outside Nagano's
home filmed two men smashing their way into the home and later
emerging with a bloodstained bayonet.
    The company, established here in 1981, undertook to hold
gold on deposit for investors. It grew into a nationwide
business operation with 87 branch offices and 7,000 employees
at its peak in early 1985.
    Toyota Shoji's business group collected an estimated 200
billion yen from about 30,000 clients, many of them pensioners
and housewives, before the firm went bankrupt in July, 1985,
according to lawyers.
    Of them, some 18,000 clients claimed they could get back
neither gold or money, suffering an aggregate loss of 150
billion yen, local press reports said.
    Police said the five arrested on charge of fraud today
included Hiroshi Ishikawa, 47, former Toyota Shoji president,
and a sixth former executive was placed on a wanted list.
    They were suspected of having collaborated with the late
Nagano in swindling about 1.5 billion yen from about 450 people
in Osaka and nearby Kobe during a six month period just before
the firm's bankruptcy, they said.
    Today's arrest came after narly two years of joint
investigation by the public prosecutors and police, who had
questioned about 3,000 of the firm's former employees,
police sources said.
 REUTER
