A federal grand jury indicted three Japanese nationals on Tuesday, including the head of a Japanese company, for defrauding the U.S. Navy and dumping contaminated water taken from naval ships into the ocean.
The President and Chief Executive Officer of Kanto Kosan, Sojiro Imahashi, along with two employees, Tsuyoshi Ifuku and Yuki Yamamiya, were charged with ocean dumping, committing major fraud against the United States, and conspiracy to make false claims, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Additionally, they received four counts of major fraud against the United States and six counts of submitting false claims.
Three Japanese nationals working for Kanto Kosan have been indicted by the DOJ for deceiving the U.S. Navy and dumping oily wastewater into the ocean (Photo by KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)
“The defendants deceived the U.S. Navy by willfully failing to satisfy the company’s obligations under $120 million in contracts with the Department of Defense that were designed, among other things, to ensure the company not only delivered the required services to the Navy, but also complied with critical environmental safeguards,” said Nicholas L. McQuaid, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
The indictment states that Kanto Kosan received $120 million in contracts from the U.S. Navy in which tens of millions were designated for removal, treatment, and disposal of contaminated, oily wastewater generated by U.S. Navy ships in Yokosuka, Sasebo, and Okinawa, according to the DOJ press release. Kanto Kosan was required to treat the oil wastewater according to the Japanese environmental regulations before dumping the treated water into the ocean. (RELATED: Engineers Use Rocket Science To Make Wastewater Treatment Sustainable)
However, beginning around 2007, the three defendants acting on behalf of Kanto Kosan, had the wastewater only minimally treated, just enough to remove visible contaminates, then dumped it into the ocean, the DOJ press release states.
To avoid being caught in the testing conducted by the U.S. Navy, the defendants had a storage tank on Kanto Kosan’s treatment barges filled with tap water which they provided to the environmental testing laboratories as their samples, the press release reports.