Four Japan opposition parties submit bill to repeal casino laws amid bribery scandal

Four major opposition parties introduced a bill to scrap laws on casino resorts to the National Diet on Monday as it convened to begin a 150-day regular session.

The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the Democratic Party for the People, the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party jointly submitted the bill to the House of Representatives, The Japan Times reports.

Last week, Lower House lawmaker Tsukasa Akimoto was served an additional arrest warrant in a bribery scandal related to an envisioned project to create one of the integrated resorts (IR) that will feature casino facilities. Akimoto quit Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party after the scandal broke.

Accusations directed against lawmakers suspected of receiving money from 500.com, a Chinese company interested in operating a casino in Japan. Last week, the Abe government created a commission to manage integrated resorts.

“Casinos would be hotbeds of fraud and corruption,” a senior CDP official said. The opposition bill seeks to repeal a law on the development of such resorts that was passed in 2018 and a related law on promotion of their development passed in 2016. Akimoto was Lower House Cabinet Committee chairman when the promotion law was discussed in the Diet.

The opposition bloc plans to use the casino issue to put pressure on the government and the ruling coalition during the ordinary Diet session. “We submitted the bill as the first step to make the government give up introducing casinos,” CDP parliamentary affairs head Jun Azumi told reporters.

Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference: “We’ll will make necessary preparations so that the (positive) effects of integrated resort development will become evident as early as possible.”

As an extension of the session is expected to be difficult ahead of the Tokyo gubernatorial race and the Olympics and Paralympics this summer, the government has decided to submit 52 bills — fewer than usual and the lowest on record for a regular session since the Constitution entered into force in 1947.

Most ruling LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) and some opposition politicians think that this bribery scandal will force Abe to hold off on conducting a snap election until after the Paralympics or Olympics — sometime between late July and early September. However, other opposition politicians think that the scandal will have the opposite effect: forcing Abe to hold a snap election in the near future to quiet critics and naysayers.