A securities company employee who reported that colleagues at a group bank were pushing high-risk financial products on borrowers was transferred from Osaka to Tokyo days after he filed the report, according to a memoir by a man who spent 25 years at the firm. The book, "Shoken-man hiri hiri nikki" (Sangokan Shinsha), is by Yamato Hino, who says he filed internal and public-interest whistleblower reports and was eventually sidelined and left the company.
The episode described is his second internal report. He says bank staff at a group company were selling risky products to borrowers more or less against their will. Before filing, he told his supervisor he intended to report, framing it as a matter of honor.
What happened days later, and how it ended, is the subject of the passage. The source does not give the date of the transfer or the name of the bank.
A posting to private banking control
In the spring of 2015, Hino was moved to the private banking control department. Securities firms rotate staff every two to three years, and he writes that he did not mind starting over. He had learned investor psychology at a branch, studied how wealthy and foreign clients think at C Bank, watched companies being sold in the M&A department, and seen how schools and local governments handle money in the public-interest corporation division.
The private banking control department supports the private banking unit, which serves wealthy clients, from behind the scenes. Rather than selling products, staff check proposals, handle contracts, manage risk and coordinate inside the company. It is back-office work inside a world of assets measured in hundreds of millions of yen.
“I was not selling products to customers the way a salesman does.”Yamato Hino, former securities company employee
Reporting up the line
Hino writes that he could not look away from conduct he considered wrong, and that he filed internal and public-interest whistleblower reports repeatedly. He says he was demoted and ultimately left the company. Under Japan's public-interest whistleblower protection law, retaliatory treatment of a worker who reports wrongdoing is prohibited.
The excerpt from the book was published with the article. It covers only the second report and the transfer that followed; the source does not say what the company concluded about the report or whether the transfer was officially tied to it.