At first, the February car crash in Tokyo's exclusive Minato-ku only seemed out of the ordinary because it involved a black Maserati slamming into a taxi, but it has turned out to be very special indeed. And for all the wrong reasons, Shukan Asahi (4/4) opines.

"The Maserati rammed right into the back of the taxi, probably because the driver wasn't paying enough attention to what was going on ahead of him," a witness to the crash tells Shukan Asahi. "The passenger got out of the back of the cab holding their neck and looking in real pain. A police patrol car and ambulance arrived on the scene and the police took away the white guy who'd been driving the Maserati in their patrol car."

The "white guy" was 37-year-old Jon-Paul Toppino, the Representative Director and Chief Investment Officer of Secured Capital Japan Co.

Secured Japan is a company owned by a U.S. real estate investment firm. It arrived in Japan in 1997, went on to the Mother's Index in 2004 and was listed on the prestigious First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December last year.

Fortunately, nobody was badly hurt in the accident, but it has become a problem because Toppino was allegedly driving without a license.

"He apparently forgot to renew his Japanese driver's license and kept on driving without it," an insider in the police investigation into the case tells Shukan Asahi. "You hear of lots of cases where foreigners who've illegally overstayed their visas have fled from car accidents because they were driving unlicensed, but I've never heard of a director from a company listed on the Top Section of the stock exchange driving around without a license."

Shukan Asahi says it tried to contact Toppino to get his side of the story, but Secured Japan refused all requests to cooperate with the article: not behavior suitable for a company seeking money from individual Japanese investors at a time when the sub-prime problems are escalating, the weekly says.

Thanks to changes last year in the Road Traffic Law, Toppino is liable to jail time of up to a year or a maximum fine of 300,000 yen if he was actually found to have been driving unlicensed. Usually, though, first offenders are "let off" with a fine of a few hundred thousand yen and being reported to prosecutors.

But a presumably Japanese manager from a foreign-owned investment bank uses the case to take a pot shot at foreigners in the Japanese financial world.

"Loads of foreigners working for foreign-owned companies never get a Japanese license and just drive around on an international driver's license. They've got no idea of Japan's road rules," the banker tells Shukan Asahi. "They figure everything's all right if they just pay a fine. There are more than a few who have no inclination of abiding by Japanese laws." (By Ryann Connell)