TOKYO, Aug. 2 Kyodo -- The former president of a waste management firm was arrested Friday on suspicion of bribing a government official to obtain information on the business needs of the nuclear industry, police said.

Osamu Ishikura, 52, former owner of the company based in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, turned himself in to authorities two days after Toshiyuki Takahashi, 45, a deputy division chief at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, was arrested Wednesday.

Ishikura admitted to obtaining information from Takahashi, but denied allegations that he had bribed Takahashi, saying he only lent money to him.

Takahashi is suspected of receiving a total of 10.5 million yen in bribes from August 1999 through January this year from Ishikura and Yoshinori Okamoto, a 39-year-old former board member of a Shizuoka-based computer software company. Okamoto was also arrested Wednesday.

Investigators allege Takahashi, a chief safety inspector of Japanese nuclear power plants, began passing information to the pair in 1998 when he was working in a Diet science and technology office serving lawmakers.

They said the information concerned business uses of and potential clients for computerized designs of nuclear plant facilities, desalination projects and other industrial projects.

The two allegedly used the information to start new businesses, but they failed to take off, apparently due to a lack of technological skills.

Takahashi, a former technician at the defunct Science and Technology Agency, worked in the House of Representatives office from 1998 until January last year, when he was transferred to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, a unit of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.