Global tycoons are rarely strangers to risk, but no chief executive has made a bet as epic as the one Carlos Ghosn made last December.
The former boss of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance did something that he knew would mean he would either live the rest of his life as a free man or die in prison. Despite being under house arrest on financial misconduct charges involving nearly £80 million, he fled Japan as a stowaway on a midnight private jet. “It was a huge risk,” he says with surprising dispassion.
It’s 9.30am in central Beirut and the world’s most famous fugitive is talking to me as he crosses Abdel Wahab el-Inglizi Street and walks into the Hotel Albergo with his wife, Carole. It’s one of the few hotels in the city that’s still open after the vast explosion in the port in August. Ghosn’s nearby home was damaged in the blast but, to him, the battered city is paradise. “I can be with my wife, my kids, who I thought I might never see again,” he says, smiling.
Ghosn, who transformed Nissan from a struggling rival of Toyota and Honda to a worldbeater that built the UK’s largest car plant in Sunderland, was arrested in November 2018 and charged with under-reporting tens of millions of pounds in earnings. He denies the charges. He was held in solitary confinement in a freezing cell in Tokyo for 130 days and then under house arrest. But last December, the 66-year-old escaped on a private jet to Istanbul and then another to Beirut. It was both the business story and the crime story of the decade.
Safely back home (Lebanon doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Japan), he’s ready to tell his side of the story. “I’m fighting for my reputation,” he says, his eyes suddenly as bright as his cornflower-blue shirt. He has written a book, Time for the Truth, in which he accuses Nissan of fabricating the charges against him. He claims that the company wanted to oust him to prevent him from giving Renault greater power in the alliance, a move that would have been too great a blow to Japanese corporate and national pride, he says. What we now know for sure, though, is how he pulled off an escape act that makes Houdini look like an amateur.
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Slimey little corrupt piece of shit. I hope they take him out.
I know it's the comments section (where different rules seem to apply), but he hasn't been found guilty of anything as yet and why so angry?
But he has been found guilty. The US SEC found him, and others, guilty of fraud. He paid $1million and has been banned from being a company diorector in the US for ten years.
He has also absconded while on bail and committed immigration offences, both of which are admitted. If you read the above you'd be forgiven for believing that he was an effective bystander in his being sprung from Japan, but as was found in the Taylor extradition case €1million was paid to them, from accounts linked to Ghosn two months before it happened. The same accounts are also being examined by French police and prosecutors in respect of embezzlement in France. And , of course, there's the crap he's left behind him that others are having to deal with.
I think it is reasonable to conclude that hes slimey and corrupt. Little is without doubt and definitely a shit.
Why aren't you angry? Another rich entitled shyster screwing taxpayers, letting others pay the price for his crimes, and you think that's ok? And he is guilty - see below.
Hmmm ... an extraordinary story but it all sits a bit uneasily with me.
Would you be telling this story if a senior British car executive was similarly accused in the UK of such significant fraud allegations and had fled to Japan. I think not.
And since when did it become acceptable for an alleged criminal to write and promote a book about an ongoing criminal accusation, further profiting from the alleged crime. Baffling!
Autocar has form for giving unquestioned page time to criminals, liars, and charlatans so the fact that this gets printed, with all the "boys own adventure" type wank (burner phone, FFS) is no real surprise, though your main point may have some merit.
One correction, though. He's not an alleged criminal. He is a criminal. Absconded from bail, not escaped, and committed immigration offences in Turkey. Neither of those points are in doubt and are admitted. Ghosn, Greg Kelly, and Nissan also paid their way out of grief after the US SEC found that they had concealed payments of $140 million from investors. Fraud. Without admitting guilt Ghosn paid $1million and was banned from serving as a director or officer of a US company for 10 years.
And on the Turkey point, it's not just Taylor and son seeing the inside of courtrooms. Seven employees of MNG Jet are on bail awaiting trial in Turkey on people smuggling charges and on completion of that trial, and any subsequent sentencing, three or four of them face extradition also.
It's an interesting, and somewhat amusing, side note that the aircraft that took Ghosn from Kansei to Instanbul was a very much tracked aircraft because it had been very busy removing people and things, read gold, out of Caracas to various European destinations during the uprising against Maduro in April and May of 2019. So when that aircraft appeared in Kansei it was noticed and once it had the. arrived in Instanbul and very soon after Ghosn popped up in Beirut it wasn't that hard to put together what had happened.
Ghosn is a vain little man that doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself. It's worth noting that criminal trials of Nissan and Kelly, but not Ghosn, because he absconded, commenced in September with Kelly's ongoing and Nissan pleading, not that you'd know about it through Autocar.
"Ghosn, who transformed Nissan from a struggling rival of Toyota and Honda to a worldbeater that built the UK’s largest car plant in Sunderland,"
Nissan was worldbeater that built Sunderland sometime between 1984 and 1986 when Ghosn was still at Michelin, 10-12 years before he joined Renault and 13-15 years before he was sent to Nissan.