Mizuho Financial Group, Japan’s second-biggest lender by assets, has tried to draw a line under a Japanese mafia scandal by cutting the pay of senior managers and scaling back the power of its chairman.
Mizuho has been under fire since the end of September, when it said more than Y200m ($2m) of loans from a consumer-finance affiliate had found their way to “antisocial forces”, including Yakuza gangsters, without the knowledge of senior managers, prompting a rebuke from the Financial Services Agency.
The scandal deepened after Mizuho admitted that executives including Yasuhiro Sato, group president, received documents disclosing the problem more than two years earlier.