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CONFIDENTIAL
16
10 November, 1970.
门
Hong Kong Container Berths
Thank you for your letter (FSR 1147G) of 27 October to David Wright, in which you clarified OCL's position over Oyama's representations. We are of course "suitably mollified" by your account of things, but I really do not know how we could have drawn any other conclusion than the one we did from the original record we got of Mr. St. Johnstone's conversation with Goodison on 27 July. However, this is now water over the dam.
2. On the same subject, you may be interested in a side light on the Oyama interest in Hong Kong container berths which John Whitehead and David Wright picked up at a lunch the other day with Kaneda of the Japanese Ministry of Transport (whom I believe you know from CSG meetin s). When they mentioned this problem in passing, Kaneda remarked that the Japanese Government had been very surprised at Oyama's success in bidding for No. 2 berth at Hong Kong. He said that the Oyama Shipping Line was a short-haul company with a certain amount of business between Japan and South East Asia but he did not seem to think that this was enough to warrant a berth of their own in Hong Kong. Kaneda said that in the Ministry of Transport's view Oyama's bid was purely specu-
lative.
3. Kaneda then went on, however, to explain something of Oyama's background. There was no doubt that he had friends in high places. Oyama himself came from an ex-Japanese Prime Minister's family and he apparently had close relations with the present Prime Minister, Mr. Sato, dating back for a number of years. In the early 1950s, when employed by Mitsui, he had been involved in a shipbuilding bribery scandal which resulted in the dismissal of a number of senior Ministry of Transport officials. Oyama also lost his job with Mitsui as a consequence. However, the most interesting feature of this scandal was the alleged involvement of the present Japanese Prime Minister. Sato was at that time a senior Liberal Democratic Party member, and he apparently only avoided prosecu- tion after instructions to that effect had been given by the
/Minister
C. M. Drukker, Esq.,
Shipping Policy Division,
Department of Trade and Industry,
The Adelphi,
John Adam Street,
London, W.c. 2.
CONFIDENTIAL
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