Enlarge / Carlos Ghosn, former chairman of Nissan and head of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, fled house arrest in Japan for Lebanon at the end of December 2019.
Toru Hanai / Bloomberg via Getty Images
The past few days have been filled with drama for one of the most famous executives in the automotive industry. Carlos Ghosn used to lead the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, a complicated collaboration between the three car manufacturers that sells more metal than anyone except Toyota and Volkswagen Group. But in November 2018, he was arrested by the Japanese police on charges of financial misconduct and was replaced as head of both Nissan and Mitsubishi.
However, Ghosn claimed that he was set up by rivals at Nissan, who said he was behind claims that he was putting payments to car dealers in the Middle East in his pocket and hiding income beyond his annual salary of millions of dollars. After spending more than three months in prison, Ghosn was released on bail – a hefty $ 9 million (1 billion yen) – but kept under house arrest.
Instead of submitting to the Japanese criminal justice system – which has an almost perfect conviction rate and shares little of the same protection for suspects that exist in the US or Europe – Ghosn apparently decided that a change of scenery was appropriate. That’s where it all gets a little weird. Late in the night of December 29, he fled the country to Lebanon; he has Lebanese (as well as French and Brazilian) citizenship and is close to the Lebanese government, which has no extradition treaty with Japan.
On New Year’s Eve, Ghosn issued a statement from Lebanon saying that he “would no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese legal system where guilt is suspected, discrimination reigns and fundamental human rights are denied, in flagrant disregard for Japanese legal obligations under international law and treaties it must adhere to. “
The Japanese authorities are still trying to determine how Ghosn managed to evade their surveillance. The Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that Ghosn had two French passports, and the courts let him keep one of them in a closed case instead of holding it in his lawyers (along with the Lebanese, Brazilian and other French passports) ). The Lebanese authorities, for their part, say he entered the country legally under a French passport.
The first reports that he was hiding in a box that was meant to contain musical instruments for a band playing in his house are apparently wide of the mark. Instead, it is more likely that he was smuggled into a private cargo plane in Osaka, en route to Istanbul, Turkey. The Turks are not particularly happy with their involvement and have arrested four pilots, two ground handlers and the operations manager of the freight company for their involvement in the escape.
Now Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for Ghosn, who issued a second statement on Thursday stating that his escape is all he did and that neither his wife nor other family members were involved.
