For his part, Ghosn insisted that he be recompensed royally throughout, and he was. His people wrote the rules, and the rules at Nissan neglected to provide much oversight for high-end executive compensation. But the case Ghosn made—to both the French and Japanese ends of the alliance—was strong on its face. Significant costs had to be excised, efficiencies had to be realized, and heads had to roll if either company was to survive. Ghosn, who had a chameleon-like ability to move easily between cultures while keeping a weather eye open for the subtle cues distinct to each land in which he worked, was above all revered for his ability to speak the international language of money. Profitability, market share, the things that previous generations of executives in both countries had let slide, were the currency in which he traded, and his ambitious projections, realized against all odds as laid by the conventional thinkers, only cemented his regal stature.
Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa delivered the news in November 2018 like a thrust dagger; Ghosn and his roving lawyer, union buster, and all-around bagman, Greg Kelly, nominally the head of human resources at Nissan’s U.S. headquarters in Tennessee, had been found in an internal Nissan investigation in Japan to have under-declared income they’d received from the company, without the company’s knowledge, and were arrested by police. French prosecutors are also examining, at Nissan’s invitation, the financing of Ghosn’s Versailles wedding.
(While Ghosn has skated for the time being, Kelly, who has presumably had occasion to wonder about this latest turn of events over his kitchen table, has apparently been left behind to face the Japanese penal system on his own, though Ghosn did give him a solidarity shoutout at his recent press conference.)
Other charges assembled against Ghosn included transferring an investment loss to Nissan during the 2008 financial crisis and allegations of illegal bribes as well as funky self-dealing payments related to Middle Eastern distribution arrangements.
With a 15-year prison sentence surely looming for their hard-charging CEO/messiah—Japanese federal prosecutors boast an astounding, some would even say hard-to-swallow, 99% conviction rate—a saddened Renault board fell in behind Nissan on Ghosn’s ouster within a short time. Somebody had to run the show, and now, with the almighty Ghosn sidelined, it was every ambitious corporate astronaut and his brother’s turn to go for it, with predictable chaos ensuing.
Ghosn’s genius was to stitch together two disparate business cultures. And while it’s easy to see that the two didn’t always get along or even understand each other, it’s equally hard to imagine that no one at Nissan or Renault knew that Ghosn wasn’t growing extraordinarily rich at the helm of the alliance or that he might be bending rules, possibly even breaking them. Criminality is not unknown in the executive board room. At the same time, the political dimension—France, Inc. vs. Japan, Inc.—is overlaid everywhere in Ghosn’s tale. By the end of what remains an extraordinarily long tenure for a 21st-century CEO, he may have outlived his usefulness.
From the start, Ghosn has protested his innocence, and decried what he saw as the political motivation of the Nissan executives who laid him low, calling his “backstabbing” accusers part of a “conspiracy,” a “secret task force” that included disgruntled Nissan executives, jealous competitors, self-interested two-timing lawyers, and overzealous representatives of the Japanese government, who, he alleged, feared that Renault board members and executives would be taking an even greater role in steering the enormous company he’d assembled and fought to keep united. Among the executives on his shit list with a bullet: Toshiaki Onuma and Hari Nada, Nissan executives who struck plea-bargain agreements with prosecutors prior to Ghosn’s arrest. Hitoshi Kawaguchi, Nissan’s former head of government affairs who ran interference between the carmaker and Japan’s government, is also not in the Ghosn household’s cavalcade of stars.
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January 11, 2020 at 06:45AM
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How Carlos Ghosn Reveals the Limits of Modern Global Corporate Culture - Vanity Fair
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