A man walks past a signboard of MUFG Bank in Tokyo, Japan. Photo by Reuters
A former employee of the MUFG Bank has been arrested for allegedly stealing 20 kilograms of gold bullion worth 260 million yen (US$1.6 million) from customers’ safe deposit boxes.
Yukari Imamura, 46, was arrested by police on Tuesday, accused of stealing the gold, which had been deposited by two male customers at the bank’s Nerima branch in Tokyo in September last year, The Japan Times reported.
She allegedly sold the gold for cash to multiple pawn shops and used the funds primarily for investments.
The woman, who has confessed to the theft, reportedly incurred major losses from foreign exchange margin trading and horse racing and had a lot of debt, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Imamura, who was responsible for managing safe deposit boxes at MUFG Bank’s Nerima and Tamagawa branches in Tokyo from April 2020 to October 2024, is also suspected of stealing assets worth more than 1 billion yen from the safe deposit boxes of around 60 customers over the four-and-a-half-year period, Kyodo News reported, citing the lender.
Opening a safe deposit box requires two keys: a bank key held by the lender and a customer key held by the client.
As a safeguard against customers losing their keys, the lender also keeps spare customer keys at its branches, which Imamura allegedly used to access the boxes.
MUFG Bank began investigating the thefts late last October after a customer reported missing contents from their safe deposit box.
It fired Imamura on Nov. 14 after she admitted to stealing customers’ assets and filed criminal charges against her the following month.
MUFG Bank is the largest lender in Japan and the main banking unit of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, a leading global financial services group. It operates 421 domestic and 104 overseas branches and employs over 31,000 staff as of March 2024, according to its website.
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