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Naka is still in prison but returned to social media to share his perspective on the case.
Image credit: Paramount Pictures
Yuji Naka, the co-creator of Sonic, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for insider trading last year. He disappeared from social media then but suddenly returned yesterday to share a new detail related to his trial.
Here's a little info about his case: Naka pled guilty to buying shares based on insider information about upcoming Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games and then selling them for a higher price, earning over ¥20 million (about $131,600 now). He had to pay ¥173 million ($1.2 million) in fines and is now serving his sentence in prison.
A recent report from Bloomberg states that Square Enix reassigned the Dragon Quest producer Yu Miyake to the mobile games department. Miyake has been with the company since 1992, and sources say that his reassignment is part of a restructuring designed to make Square Enix less reliant on external resources.
In response to the news, Naka said that Miyake lied in court documents, likely talking about his own trial, as spotted by VGC.
“Finally. I was hoping he would be gone soon because he is the kind of person who would submit a note with a lie (with evidence) to a court of law. I have never met him, but the new [Square Enix] president might be a good person.”
Miyake was an executive officer for Balan Wonderworld, a game published by Square Enix. It is said that Naka, who was working on Balan Wonderworld at the time, learned that the game developer Aiming was preparing a new Dragon Quest mobile game – Dragon Quest Tact – ahead of its official announcement. In December 2022, Naka was arrested for similar insider trading schemes linked to Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier.
Naka's X/Twitter comment doesn't specify what exactly Miyake said wrong, but it looks like he's not going down without a fight.
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