Carlos Ghosn, Victim or Villain?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/opinion/carlos-ghosn-escape-japan.html

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The latest episode in the long-running saga of Carlos Ghosn, his news conference in Beirut on Wednesday, was a fitting sequel to the drama of his arrest in Japan, his stints in jail and his made-for-TV flight concealed in a large trunk and accompanied by a former Green Beret. Longtime viewers will recall that in earlier seasons, Mr. Ghosn, the son of three continents, had leapfrogged across the globe to save two auto companies from ruin (or was it three?), had staged a fabulous wedding at the Palace of Versailles and had done feats too many to list.

Now, having fled to Lebanon, the home of his ancestors, the 65-year-old fugitive executive tirelessly, at times passionately, held forth in English, French, Arabic and Portuguese before a packed room of reporters, flashing hard-to-read documents on a screen to proclaim that he was innocent of all the charges he faced in Japan, insisting that he had not fled from justice, since none was possible in Japan, but rather in search of justice against a political mugging.

Claiming that Japanese officials had sought to paint him as a “cold, greedy dictator,” he dramatically insisted that he was the opposite — a man who loved the Japanese, who could have made a lot more money if, for example, he had accepted an offer to take charge of General Motors, and who was never accused of being a tyrant until his arrest in November 2018. And to prove that he deserved whatever compensation he had received, he noted that Renault and Nissan had been doing very badly since his arrest and forced resignations.

The story is fantastic, even by the standards of today’s TV dramas. It is also important, a look at the underside of a high-stakes multinational industry, brutal corporate intrigue, extravagant compensation packages and complex international deals, both above and below board. Mr. Ghosn was the master of all these, and his leadership of a rocky alliance of three major auto companies — Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi — will, as he rightly claimed, be long studied among the case histories of business schools. He also lived high, spending big and hopping among grand residences in Brazil, Lebanon and France.

Unresolved in all this is whether Mr. Ghosn is guilty of the crimes he was accused of in Japan and deserves to serve time in prison, or whether the Japanese legal system, with its 99 percent conviction rate and the inordinate pressure it puts on suspects to confess — in Mr. Ghosn’s case this included questioning him for hours without a lawyer by his side, all but cutting off any contacts with his wife and holding him for weeks in jail — meets international standards of justice. Equally unclear is whether the case against Mr. Ghosn was based on a fair assessment of his transgressions, or whether, as he claimed, Nissan had conspired with the government to bring down a foreigner who was imposing foreign ways on a Japanese company.

The charges against Mr. Ghosn — and his against Japan’s courts — deserve a closer look. There is no question that he functioned at the margins of the law. In September, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged that he and a colleague had concealed $140 million in payments from Nissan; the case was settled with fines against Mr. Ghosn, his colleague and Nissan and with a ban on his serving as an executive in America for 10 years. But then compensation packages at his level are often complex and open to differing accounting interpretations. And it is no secret that there was a power struggle at the top of Nissan, that the Japanese executive who would later become Nissan’s chief executive, Hiroto Saikawa, wanted Mr. Ghosn out. Mr. Saikawa was himself forced to resign in September over improper compensation.

Japan has demanded that Mr. Ghosn be returned to stand trial, but that is unlikely, given that he has Lebanese, French and Brazilian citizenship. And given that the Japanese justice system is also on trial, it may be better for this saga to play out in the court of public opinion. Mr. Ghosn needs to make a far more convincing case than he did at his theatrical news conference if he is serious about clearing his name. And Japan needs to take a close look to see whether its justice system is due for a fundamental rethinking.

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