Fukushima News 7/31/15: Three Ex-TEPCO Execs Face Criminal Charges

Fukushima News 7/31/15: Three Ex-TEPCO Execs Face Criminal Charges

Three former TEPCO executives to stand trial
Nuclear & Energy Jul. 31, 2015 - Updated 03:01 UTC-4
Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company will face mandatory indictment over the March 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Nobody has been held criminally responsible so far for Japan's worst nuclear accident.
The prosecution inquest panel of randomly-selected citizens voted for the indictment on Friday, disagreeing for a 2nd time with prosecutors who had dismissed the complaint filed against the officials. The prosecutors said the officials could not have predicted a quake and tsunami on the scale of the March 11th disasters.
The decision leads to the mandatory indictment of former TEPCO chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata and former vice presidents Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro for professional negligence resulting in death and injury.

Maybe they will be acquitted. They say they couldn't foresee a sunami that big after such a massive quake (paraphrasing)

Stay tuned..

a reply to: imd12c4funn
The problem with that defense they couldn't foresee it is that their own employees DID foresee it, a couple years before it happened, and suggested TEPCO make some changes, but TEPCO decided against following their employees recommendations because it would have cost money. Turns out they didn't save anything, it would have been cheaper to spend the money. It really was a criminal act to pretend that longer outages of power couldn't be foreseen when their backup generators weren't adequately protected and battery backup doesn't last long.

Actually what I am amazed to hear is that former chairman and vice-presidents are held responsible. There are many occasions when chairmen or CEOs avade responsibility but instead regular employees get punished for their wrong doings. That's why I respect Japanese because whenevr something goes wrong in a company it means that the CEO is responsible because he is the one who makes the final decision and it is up to him to decide how the company should develop.
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LW
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