Shareholder Spotlight : Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management - Filthy Money, Fake Morals, and, (of course), a Stake in Cummins

First, some respect where it’s due.

There was a time when the word “Mitsubishi” meant something genuinely exciting. Lancer Evo IV through X barking their way round rally stages and boy racer car parks. Galant VR-4s doing family-saloon cosplay while trying to rip the tarmac up. The GTO / 3000GT turning up like a PlayStation fever dream with more gadgets than sense. Four-wheel-drive, twin-turbo, mad aero, proper lunacy. Mitsubishi used to build cars that felt like they’d been signed off by engineers on their third espresso and a mild breakdown.

Then something snapped. The Evos died. The Galant went beige. The GTO vanished. What’s left on the road now is mostly crossover porridge – ASX, Outlander, whatever – appliances on wheels with the soul hoovered out. The badge stayed. The myth evaporated.

That arc is a handy metaphor for what we are looking at here. Because Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management Co Ltd – the money arm sitting inside Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group – is the same story in corporate form. The name still glows. Underneath, it is all compromise, compliance fines, and quiet filth.

Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management likes to sell itself as a sober steward of other people’s money. Japan’s biggest banking group. Trillions of yen under management. ESG brochures thicker than a phone book. All very responsible, very grown-up, very “trust us, we’re boring”.

Underneath that brushed steel PR? It is not boring. It is filthy.

MUAM sits inside Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) – a banking blob with a sanctions record, a market-rigging record, and a regulator-dodging record long enough to wrap round the Ginza. The group has been whacked for hundreds of millions of dollars in fines across the US, UK and Japan. And now this lot are sitting comfortably on a stake in Cummins Inc – yes, that Cummins – the diesel cheat that just paid a record $1.675 billion civil penalty for emissions fraud.

Perfect. A dirty bank’s asset arm backing a dirty engine maker. You could not script a better partnership if you tried.

The Rotten Family Tree

MUAM is the money-managing limb of MUFG – the banking conglomerate built from mergers of already-troubled lenders in the 2000s. UFJ Holdings, one of the key ancestors, had such a mess of bad loans and governance failures that regulators had to lean in hard just to keep the thing upright long enough to merge.

The PR version is “rationalisation” and “synergies”. The real version is a panic wedding to keep a wobbly institution from going under.

That DNA matters. You do not get a squeaky-clean asset manager out of a family that only exists because the alternative was collapse.

Sanctions Games: Hiding Wire Transfers For The Bad Guys

Roll on to the 2010s and MUFG’s flagship bank, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (now MUFG Bank), is caught playing dress-up with US sanctions rules.

US and New York regulators found the bank stripped or altered information on thousands of wire transfers tied to Iran, Sudan and Myanmar – exactly the regimes you are supposed to ring-fence. Identifiers removed. Transactions pushed through US clearing while pretending nothing was amiss. This was not one clerk pressing the wrong key. It ran for years.

New York’s Department of Financial Services unloaded on them – first a $250 million penalty in 2013, then another $315 million in 2014 for lying to regulators and leaning on PwC to sanitise an internal report. PwC itself got a $25 million smack for bending the knee.

You read that right: the auditor got fined for helping a bank make sanctions breaches look prettier.

And this is the group whose asset arm now wants to tell you about “responsible investment”.

Telling UK Regulators To Get Stuffed

You would think after that, the group might discover humility. Of course not.

Between 2014 and 2017, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and MUFG Securities in London failed to properly tell the UK Prudential Regulation Authority about those US sanctions findings. Senior managers knew. The information did not make it to the regulator in the way it was supposed to.

The PRA eventually fined the two entities nearly £27 million combined – and that is after the standard discount for not dragging it through the courts.

Translation: confronted with serious misconduct in one jurisdiction, the group’s instinct was not “come clean everywhere”. It was “say as little as possible and hope nobody asks the right questions”.

Spoofing The Market: Bond Prices As A Party Trick

Then there is Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities – the joint-venture broker that helps place bonds and equities.

Japanese regulators nailed them for manipulating Japanese government bond futures. Traders placed orders they never intended to execute – spoofing – to move prices around and bump profits. Tiny edge, big risk. It is the kind of petty manipulation that tells you everything you need to know about the culture: if there is a line, lean over it.

Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission recommended fines and business suspensions. MUFG apologised, promised yet another round of “training”, and life went on. Because when you are this big, market manipulation is treated more like a parking ticket than a crisis of integrity.

Remember, this is all the same group. These are the desks whose flows and products feed into the portfolios MUAM sells as prudent, long-term investments.

Client Secrets As Party Favours

Leap forward again. In 2024, Japan’s Financial Services Agency and SESC hit MUFG Bank and its securities allies for sharing confidential client information – investment plans, loan discussions, non-public data – to cross-sell and push deals.

At least 26 cases. Clients had said “do not share this”. Staff shared it anyway to hit performance targets. Executives took pay cuts. Regulators issued business improvement orders. The usual ritual.

If you are a retail customer, your reaction is probably “so what, banks snoop”. If you are an asset management client, it is more serious. Your asset arm is supposed to behave like a fiduciary, not a gossip line. Once again, the group saw lines on the page and treated them like suggestions, not boundaries.

The Cummins Connection: Filth Meets Filth

Now park MUAM in the spotlight.

Recent filings show Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management holding a stake in Cummins Inc – hundreds of thousands of shares, putting tens of millions of dollars to work backing a diesel manufacturer that has just been dragged through the mud for emissions cheating.

Not some passive index-math accident either: the position has been adjusted over time, with fresh reporting highlighting new purchases in late 2025. Still a small percentage of Cummins overall, but big enough to matter on MUAM’s books.

Cummins, for anyone just joining this blog, agreed to pay a record $1.675 billion civil penalty after US and California regulators concluded it had installed defeat devices on 2013–2019 Ram diesel pickups. Software that detected test cycles and cleaned up the numbers on the screen while letting the engines spew illegal levels of NOx the rest of the time. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Millions of people breathing the consequences.

Add recall costs and extra measures, and the total price tag edges towards $2 billion. Cummins calls it “moving forward”. Communities downwind can call it what it is: a long, slow gassing for profit.

So when MUAM – draped in ESG slogans and “sustainable investment” badges – chooses to hold a chunk of Cummins, it is not an innocent diversification. It is a conscious decision to back an emissions cheat and hope nobody notices the hypocrisy.

You cannot preach stewardship with one hand and cash Cummins dividends with the other without people wondering what the word “stewardship” even means in that building.

Violation Tracker As Mood Board

Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker database does not lie. Stack up MUFG’s entries globally – sanctions cases, controls failures, market abuse – and you are into the hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties.

This is a group for whom getting caught is simply one of the costs of scale. Pay the fine. Announce “lessons learned”. Move on. Repeat.

MUAM itself has not been front-page in these enforcement stories. That is how the game works. The grubbiest bits sit in the banking and securities entities; the asset arm gets to stand three feet away and talk about ESG ratings and long-term value.

But the money sloshing through those funds is still tied to a group that has dodged sanctions rules, misled regulators, shared client secrets and spoofed bond markets. And now it is quietly backing a diesel manufacturer that lied about what was coming out of its tailpipes.

That is the point of this spotlight. Not to pretend MUAM personally wrote defeat-device code or filed doctored SWIFT messages, but to show the ecosystem. A scandal-soaked financial group’s asset arm choosing to back a scandal-soaked industrial.

If you are a Cummins investor, this is one of the bedfellows you share the cap table with. If you are a MUAM client, this is where some of your “sustainable” money is going.

You deserve to know.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Shareholder Spotlight : Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management – Filthy Money, Fake Morals, and, (of course), a Stake in Cummins