Where’s The Cash Now?

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Questions about cash are raised in a couple of stories this morning.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth about the alleged cricket fixing by members of the Pakistan cricket team increases in intensity day by day. If proved true, it is of course a disgrace and those involved should be dealt with appropriately.

At this time no-one has been charged with an offence. So what happens now to the £150,000 in ‘readies’ that the News of the World handed over to the alleged fixer?

Questions about cash have also been raised in Japan where officials took a closer look at Tokyo’s oldest man who had been drawing his pension until the age of 111. Alas for his daughter and granddaughter, who have now been arrested, it seems that the man in question died thirty years ago after his mummified remains were found last month.

Police are now looking to see what has happened to the nine million yen (around £68,500) he is said to have drawn for the last thirty years!
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Daddy’s A Mummy?

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Now and again tales of the weird and wonderful overtake the daily round of news stories about the economy and other such things that regularly make you sigh. So it makes a nice change to find a story that makes you wonder at the ingenuity and incredulity of some folk.

Take the example of Tokyo’s oldest man, Mr Kato. Local welfare officials decided to honour him with a cake on his 115th birthday and pitched up with it at his address in Adachi ward. Overruling his granddaughter who said that he didn’t want to see anybody, they entered the house and found that Mr Kato was a mummified corpse laying in bed, dressed in his pyjamas and covered with a blanket.

According to his family Mr Kato, ‘confined himself in his room more than thirty years ago and became a living Buddha’. Being dead, Mr Kato was, of course, unable to explain how he had managed to spend 9.5 million yen (£70,000) in widower's pension payments after his wife died six years ago.

Doubtless, at some point in the future a whole range of officials will be called to account for why benefits were paid to a dead man for so long without any of them paying a courtesy call on him!

Especially on his 100th birthday!
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