The box of the most expensive cuts of whale meat had been illicitly removed by crew of the Nisshin Maru, the whaling factory ship, following this year’s Southern Ocean whale hunt. Its contents were marked “cardboard” and it was shipped to a private address. Tracked by our investigators, it was intercepted and turned over to the Public Prosecutor in Tokyo, as evidence of wide-scale corruption at the heart of the whaling operation in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

We requested an investigation into the scandal, and the Public Prosecutor agreed that there was sufficient evidence of wrongdoing. The investigation is currently underway, and has not yet reached any conclusions.  In light of evidence that the operators of the whaling operation were aware of the scandal and did nothing, we asked that the investigation not focus on crew, but on the bureaucrats who run the whaling programme at public expense.

The Japanese whaling programme costs the Japanese taxpayer 500 million yen per year (around 4.7 million US dollars). 

The only arrests thus far have been of the Greenpeace activists who presented the evidence. 

TAKEN FROM www.greenpeace.org