TOKYO: Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp's Nagoya steel plant was searched by police on Wednesday, following a fire earlier this month, a spokesman at Japan's biggest steelmaker said.
Fifteen workers were injured at the plant, which produces about 15 percent of the company's steel output, when a fire broke out on Sept. 3, the fifth incident at the 56-year-old facility in the central prefecture of Aichi this year.
Police are investigating the Nippon Steel plant on suspicion of professional negligence resulting in bodily injury, Kyodo News reported on Wednesday.
The Nippon Steel spokesman declined to comment on the details on the investigation beyond confirming "the plant was searched earlier today", when contacted by Reuters.
An Aichi prefectural police spokesman declined to comment, when contacted by phone. Before this month's fire the Nagoya plant had experienced power failures and releases of smoke four times from January to July, raising concerns about the safety of its aging facilities.
Output has not been resumed to the level before the latest incident, but most of the plant units have restarted operations, apart from the coke oven and related equipment where the fire broke out, the spokesman said.
The plant, which produced 6.74 million tonnes of crude steel in the business year to March 31, supplies about half of its products to automakers including Toyota Motor Corp, Honda Motor Co Ltd and Suzuki Motor Corp.
Nippon Steel, which posted a group recurring profit - pretax and before one-off items - of 361 billion yen ($3.43 billion) in the last business year, has said a power failure in January would cut its profit by 8 billion yen.
A similar incident in June is expected to reduce its profit for the current business year by 10 billion yen, according to the company.
A spokesman said earlier this month the impact of the fire on earnings was not known.
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