After Abu officials realised the mistake, they immediately visited Taguchi and asked for the money back, the town’s mayor, Norihiko Hanada, said in an address on the town’s YouTube channel.

Taguchi agreed to travel with the officials to his bank in a government car, but he refused to enter the building and later said that he planned to consult a lawyer, according to public broadcaster NHK. Taguchi met with Abu’s deputy mayor on April 14, NHK reported, and his lawyer told the town the next day that his client would return the money.

“But he ultimately did not do so,” Hanada said on YouTube. He said Taguchi eventually told town officials that he had spent the 46.3 million yen, would not run away and planned to “atone for the sin”.

Hanada has apologised to residents on behalf of the town for losing “such a precious and a large amount of public funds.”

“The arrest will help us to get closer to knowing the truth,” he said Thursday. “His testimony will give us a steppingstone to retrieving the money.”

Masaki Kamei, a prosecutor in the city of Osaka, said that Abu officials were to blame for allowing Taguchi to drain the town’s COVID-19 relief fund.

“The town’s approach was not strict enough, and it allowed the case to develop to this point,” Kamei said. “Maybe their approach was based on a view of human nature as fundamentally good.”

Abu is about 100 miles (160 km) north of the nearest major city, Fukuoka, in an area of Yamaguchi prefecture where agriculture, fishing and forestry drive the economy. Taguchi moved there about a year and a half ago as part of a program in which the local government offers subsidies to outsiders who move in and rent unoccupied homes, said Nohara, the town official.

After the error, town officials sent COVID-19 relief payments to the local households, Nohara said, adding that the money had come from another municipal source. He did not elaborate.

Suekawa, the Abu resident, said the episode was a misfortune for a town that had successfully weathered the pandemic and hoped to attract visitors to its newly built seaside campground.

“I hope this negative image of the town will ease and that it will once again become a sunny and quiet place,” she said. “Anyone makes a mistake, so I don’t blame this man for that, but I would like him to admit his crime and give us our money back.”

In any event, Nohara said, Abu sued Taguchi last week for about ¥51 million, including legal fees.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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