Japan PM stresses support for Ozawa after scandal

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TOKYO, Feb 8 (AFP): Japan's centre-left Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said Monday he supported his party's secretary general who days earlier avoided being indicted over a political funds scandal.
Three weekend polls said around 70 per cent of Japanese voters want Ichiro Ozawa to step down as the number two in the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) over the scandal, in which three current or former Ozawa aides were indicted.
Hatoyama told reporters that he had confirmed to Ozawa -- a powerful former party president sometimes dubbed the DPJ's "Shadow Shogun" -- in a meeting Monday that he could stay on in the post.
Ozawa, 67, is the architect of last year's landslide election victory that ended half a century of nearly unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and is due to design strategy for upper house polls in July.
A defector from the conservative LDP in the early 1990s, Ozawa had faced allegations that he took bribes worth millions of dollars from a construction firm and laundered it by investing it in upscale Tokyo property.