Tokyo: Japan today denied paying for delegates of small states to attend international whaling negotiations after the premier of the Solomon Islands said he received an offer from Tokyo.

Japan has long faced accusations of vote-buying as a growing number of developing countries with little tradition of whaling enter the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

But Hideki Moronuki, the whaling chief at Japan s Fisheries Agency, said: "There is no truth to it."

"Japan has never made any offer at all to pay costs," he said.

Solomons Prime Minister Derek Sikua said on Saturday that Japan offered to pay for the country's delegates to attend the latest IWC meeting in London.

Sikua said in a joint press conference with visiting Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a strong whaling opponent, that he turned down the offer and that his country therefore did not attend the meeting last week.

Japan is pushing for the sharply divided IWC to end its 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling.

Japan continues to kill up to 1,000 whales a year using a loophole that allows "lethal research" on the giant mammals. Only Norway and Iceland defy the IWC moratorium outright.

Moronuki said Sikua may have confused the London meet with a seminar last week in Tokyo to which Japan invited delegates from 12 developing nations that have recently joined or are considering joining the IWC.

Delegates from Angola, Cambodia, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ghana, Laos, Malawi, Palau, Tanzania and Vanuatu held talks in Tokyo and toured two of Japan's traditional whaling towns.
Source : PTI