FORMER GOLD FIRM EXECUTIVES ARRESTED IN JAPAN

  The public prosecutors and police
  here arrested five former senior executives of a bankrupt gold
  deposit business group for defrauding about 450 clients of
  about 1.5 billion yen for gold bars which were never delivered,
  police said.
      The case involving the Toyota Shoji Company was highlighted
  when its 32-year-old Chairman Kazuo Nagano was stabbed to death
  here in public view in June, 1985.
      Television crews which had been waiting outside Nagano's
  home filmed two men smashing their way into the home and later
  emerging with a bloodstained bayonet.
      The company, established here in 1981, undertook to hold
  gold on deposit for investors. It grew into a nationwide
  business operation with 87 branch offices and 7,000 employees
  at its peak in early 1985.
      Toyota Shoji's business group collected an estimated 200
  billion yen from about 30,000 clients, many of them pensioners
  and housewives, before the firm went bankrupt in July, 1985,
  according to lawyers.
      Of them, some 18,000 clients claimed they could get back
  neither gold or money, suffering an aggregate loss of 150
  billion yen, local press reports said.
      Police said the five arrested on charge of fraud today
  included Hiroshi Ishikawa, 47, former Toyota Shoji president,
  and a sixth former executive was placed on a wanted list.
      They were suspected of having collaborated with the late
  Nagano in swindling about 1.5 billion yen from about 450 people
  in Osaka and nearby Kobe during a six month period just before
  the firm's bankruptcy, they said.
      Today's arrest came after narly two years of joint
  investigation by the public prosecutors and police, who had
  questioned about 3,000 of the firm's former employees,
  police sources said.
  

