This story requires our BI Prime membership. To read the full article,, former CEO and chairman of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, was arrested in Japan in late 2018 on allegations of financial malfeasance. His fall from power was the most extraordinary in the history of the auto industry.
Ghosn is a complicated business leader. This is the story of his rise, fall, and Hollywood-worthy escape from a Japanese justice system that he's accused of abusing his human rights.Haggard, gaunt, and handcuffed, he appeared in a Japanese court after being arrested at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on November 19, 2018. The authorities later indicted him on charges of concealing income and violating the trust of the company he'd rebuilt from crisis to the global powerhouse: Nissan.
The household-name CEO had become an international fugitive, pursued by Interpol, and effectively seeking asylum in one of his multiple homelands. Netflix had to deny rumors that it had inked a deal with Ghosn. The mighty leader hadn't just fallen; he'd slipped its chains and was on the lam. And without question, the disgraced hero was a celebrity again.In November 2009, a younger Carlos Ghosn stood in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium, in Los Angeles, a man at the height of his power.
"It's a real car, not a golf cart," Ghosn told the scrum of reporters gathered in the November sunshine. Ford scion Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, has already tried to hire Ghosn to fix Ford Motor Co., but the deal died when Ghosn demanded both the CEO and the chairman-of-the-board titles. Undeterred, Bill Ford tried again in 2006, but by then Ghosn might've seen the writing on the wall. The next year, Ford would post a nearly $7 billion loss in the fourth quarter, its largest ever.
Ghosn often distanced himself from the notion that he was a reducer of companies; he was instead a self-styled visionary, charting a new course for carmakers held back by the influence of the state or the inflexible, hierarchical history of Japan's business culture, where Nissan has always existed in the long shadows cast by Toyota and Honda.
"That can work for a while," he said. And it did, until Nissan retreated from the tactics in the face of posting profitless quarters. Sales, understandably, took a hit, and the carmaker lost US market share. "The chickens have come home to roost," Brauer added. The ensuing months — which saw Ghosn imprisoned for more than three months, cut off from communication with his wife, stripped of his chairmanships of Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi, released and rearrested repeatedly, placed in legal limbo after posting millions of dollars in bail money, awaiting a trial on only one of the charges lodged against him at an undetermined future date — did not depict Japanese justice in a flattering light. Medieval was more like it.
"It was brilliant to do an alliance instead of a full merger, with all the delays and politics that would have involved," a source who has worked for major US and European carmakers said. Nissan upgraded his private jet to the top-of-the-line Gulfstream V . He shuttled among his numerous residences, cultivating what Lutz called a "God-like CEO" status. He had US dealers ship a small fleet of Nissan Armada SUVs to Brazil, for his personal use.
He was, for example, nagged by Toyota's progress with gas-electric hybrids, such as the Prius, a source told me. Beneficially, this drove Ghosn to quixotically support the Leaf at a time when there was almost no market for battery-electric vehicles. Leaf would go on to become the best-selling electric car of all time.
In response to a request for comment, Nissan shared a "Special Report to Improve Governance," delivered to the board of directors on March 27, 2019. It detailed Ghosn's compensation arrangements and explained why they were both unorthodox and how they led to Ghosn's dismissal from Nissan, following his arrest. Nissan declined to comment on the charges against Ghosn in Japan.
The situation might've persisted even as Ghosn relinquished his CEO roles and entered his 60s. But then he miscalculated. In an emailed statement, Japan's minister of justice argued that the high rate of conviction was a positive feature of the nation's system. "There is an established practice in Japan's prosecutors offices only to indict a suspect where there is a high likelihood of court's conviction based on sufficient evidence, so as to avoid an innocent person to suffer from the burden of bearing judicial expenses," the statement read.