A total of 109 current and former Fukui prefectural officials received money and other gifts, worth as much as 100,000 yen ($920), from a former deputy mayor of a central Japan town hosting a nuclear power plant who is at the heart of a payments scandal involving Kansai Electric Power Co., an investigative committee said Thursday.

The committee had been looking into whether the late mayor of Takahama, Eiji Moriyama, exercised influence over the central Japan prefecture's public work projects, after he was found to have given massive gifts to executives of the utility.

The scandal involving Kansai Electric, Japan's second-largest utility, has drawn attention to the collusive ties between the country's nuclear industry and government officials.

The revelation that the utility officials received a total of 320 million yen worth of gifts from 2006 led to the resignation of its Chairman Makoto Yagi. Kansai Electric operates a nuclear plant in Takahama and Moriyama, who died in March aged 90, served as an adviser to its subsidiary for more than 30 years.

The three committee members, all lawyers, interviewed about 300 people including former governors, deputy governors and other senior officials in compiling their report.

The panel, set up by the prefecture last month, determined that 21 of the 109 officials received gifts that were "beyond basic courtesy," with five of them receiving cash or gifts worth more than 100,000 yen.

However, the committee said it did not find evidence that those who received the gifts accommodated Moriyama and so it could not say he exercised influence over the prefecture's public work projects.

Moriyama served as deputy mayor of Takahama from 1977 to 1987 and also as a human rights researcher for the prefecture between 1971 and 2018.

==Kyodo

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