Former Tepco chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata and one-time executives Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro were all found not guilty by the Tokyo district court in 2019, in the only criminal case to arise out of the world’s worst nuclear crisis since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

The ruling on Wednesday to uphold the not guilty verdict sits at odds with a separate civil case brought to the Tokyo court by Tepco shareholders, which found four former executives responsible for the 2011 nuclear disaster.

Judges ordered the former executives to pay ¥13 trillion (US$99.14 billion) in damages in the civil lawsuit. The court judged that the executives could have prevented the disaster if they had exercised due care.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear station, located about 220 km northeast of Tokyo, was rocked by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011, sparking three reactor meltdowns and prompting Japan to shut down its entire fleet of nuclear reactors.