But Ozawa Ichiro Is A Bad Man

You may recall among the purported crimes of Ozawa Ichiro, one so heinous that even the threat of having to explain it in the Diet helped convince Fujii Hirohisa to resign as Minister of Finance, was the pocketing of the leftover elections funds provided to Ozawa's Liberal Party under the public campaign financing law. Under the prevailing cant of January's reporting, Ozawa was clearly a dirty politician, for if he weren't he would have handed this money, which is specified as being solely for the financing of elections of a particular party, back to the national treasury.

Well, the folks over at the Chunichi/Tokyo Shimbun decided to take the radical step of actually checking whether or not handing the money back was what honorable men, or politicians for that matter, actually do.

The results of their research: of the seventeen parties that have received public elections financing under the campaign finance laws which either folded later or were absorbed into another party, not one has ever returned a single yen to the nation.

Not one.

The report can be found here.