Black eyes for fraud are relatively rare in HPC and the community took note when Motoaki Saito, then president of PEZY Computer, and Daisuke Suzuki, general manager, were indicted in late 2017 for defrauding the Japanese government of roughly $5.8 million (¥653 million) in 2014. Last week, Suzuki was sentenced to three years in prison which was then reduced to a four-year suspended sentence. Saito is still on trial.
Suzuki avoided jail time because he played a lesser role in the scheme according to a report in the Japan Times:
“The case has undermined social confidence in the public system aimed at supporting industrial development,” Judge Shinichiro Nakajima said in the ruling. “The sum involved in the fraud is huge and the conduct was highly malicious.”
But the judge acknowledged that Suzuki had not played a leading role in the crime and that Saito was the one who issued instructions to pad development costs to deceive a government-run industrial technology organization into paying about ¥653 million in subsidies in March and April 2014.
PEZY Computing, of course, developed the Gyoukou supercomputer which ranked fourth in last November’s Top500 list (Gyoukou does not appear on the June 2018 listing). Suzuki and Saito were accused of submitting a false report, including inflated development expenses, to the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization. “Business costs were padded through false bills and delivery slips involving business partners and affiliates that did not exist,” according to the Japan Times.
Link to Japan Times report: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/19/national/crime-legal/ex-exec-japanese-supercomputer-venture-gets-suspended-prison-term/#.W1dHpC2ZMlV
Link to earlier HPCwire article (PEZY President Arrested, Charged with Fraud): https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/12/06/pezy-president-arrested-charged-fraud/