Just two weeks into her appointment, the only female minister in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new Cabinet found herself in hot water Thursday after a weekly magazine alleged that she was paid to use her bureaucratic influence to get a tax break for a business owner in 2015.

Satsuki Katayama, the minister in charge of regional revitalization and female empowerment, swiftly blasted the report as “factually erroneous” and “inaccurate,” saying she is preparing to sue the Shukan Bunshun magazine for defamation.

The denial by Katayama — a former elite bureaucrat of the Finance Ministry — was in response to an article published the same day by the magazine, which alleged that in 2015 she received ¥1 million from a troubled business owner and approached the National Tax Agency on his behalf to negotiate the preferential tax treatment he was seeking. The Finance Ministry has jurisdiction over the National Tax Agency.

“The article makes it sound as if I had requested the ¥1 million myself and intervened in the process of a tax probe, but I have never influenced tax authorities in the interest of a specific company or received money,” Katayama said during a joint interview with media outlets on Thursday.

The article, she says, risks “significantly undermining my reputation as a politician.”

It was the first major ministerial scandal to emerge since Abe revamped his Cabinet earlier this month, following his successful re-election in September as president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Katayama was the only woman who made it into Abe’s 19-member Cabinet, despite the leader’s purported “womenomics” commitment to putting more women in leadership positions.

Source: ANNnewsCH