Carlos Ghosn long ago made it clear that he would go to the ends of the earth to expose in court the Nissan executives and those who abetted them in plotting to end his career and throw him in prison. The quest has now advanced to the filing of a US$1.1 billion lawsuit in Lebanon, where Ghosn lives as a fugitive from the Japanese authorities.
The final and most high-profile defendant in Ghosn’s Beirut lawsuit against Nissan and current and former management was served formally at the end of last week. The whole list can be published now, and it’s a good time to take a look at what Ghosn is trying to accomplish with his litigation.
Hiroto Saikawa, the automaker’s CEO at the time of Ghosn’s November 2018 arrest, joins 10 other executives and three corporate entities Ghosn blames for engaging in a conspiracy to remove him from management – he would be stripped of his chairman’s title three days after his arrest – and depriving him of his legal rights including due process.
Seven of the individuals (see below) would conduct a secret investigation beginning in July 2018. They never informed the board.
Four others (also see below) would join the undertaking in late October. Three are alleged to have traveled to Lebanon on or shortly before November 19, the day of Ghosn’s arrest, entering Ghosn’s residence and office in Beirut without warrants and taking documents and other personal effects including a computer, hard drive and handheld mobile device.
A fourth individual, who was based in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked for a Nissan subsidiary, is charged with having entered Ghosn’s apartment in that city, also without a warrant, in an attempt to gain access to Ghosn’s safe.
READ: Ghosn and pursuers pursue one another globally
As that last case underlines, by no means did all of the 11 individuals’ alleged crimes occur in Lebanon. The seven coup plotters mainly operated in Japan – although some of them are accused of having ordered the raids in Lebanon.
Having fled the country hidden in a musical instrument box, Ghosn has no plans to set foot in Japan again even as a plaintiff. Filing a complaint in Lebanon, where several of the alleged crimes occurred and where he lives now, has provided him a venue in which to attempt to litigate at least those charges.
“The complaint is very narrow and limited only to Lebanon,” Ghosn, who’s a Lebanese national along with being both Brazilian and French, told Asia Times.
In their 18-page brief filed on May 18, Ghosn’s lawyers have identified 10 Lebanese laws for the Lebanese prosecutor to consider. Among the crimes enumerated in those laws: stealing documents, fabricating evidence, violating the sanctity of his home and defamation.
The first hearing has been set for September 18, at which time the prosecutor will decide how to proceed including possibly charging the defendants with criminal violations and advancing the case to trial.
Nissan and the other defendants, including Saikawa, are expected to respond to the complaint. Failure to do so, if the case advances to trial, could result in a default judgment, which is permitted under Lebanese law.
Three companies are charged along with the 11 individuals. Ghosn has accused Nissan itself, the law firm Latham & Watkins LLP and Phoinos Investments, the Nissan subsidiary that acquired Ghosn’s Beirut residence.
Latham & Watkins’s two lead Tokyo lawyers helped plan the sting operation that resulted in Ghosn’s arrest and later omitted critical exculpatory evidence in a report to Nissan’s board. The property manager for Phoinos allegedly allowed the raid team to enter Ghosn’s office and residence. She received instructions from Hari Nada, who is a co-defendant in the claim, to grant them access.
Of the 11 individual defendants, those who are still employed by Nissan include Nada and Motoo Nagai.
Below are listed the individual defendants, with quick summaries of their roles in Ghosn’s dismissal and arrest or the raids specifically complained of in Lebanon – or both:
* Hari Nada. As head of the CEO office, Nada engineered the raids on Ghosn’s residences not only in Beirut and Rio de Janeiro but also in Paris and Amsterdam. He was working with the Tokyo prosecutor’s office, having entered into an immunity agreement three weeks earlier. He is still a senior vice president and advisor.
* Motoo Nagai. A statutory auditor at the time of Ghosn’s arrest, Nagai currently heads the influential audit committee and is a member of the board’s nomination and compensation committees. He is considered the most influential member of the board next to the CEO, Makoto Uchida.
In August 2019, Nagai was the individual who shut down the internal investigation when it turned its attention to Nada. This enabled the coverup of Nada’s central role in the coup to oust Ghosn.
Nagai and Nada, are currently at the center of the latest palace intrigue at Nissan involving the ouster of its chief operating officer, Ashwani Gupta, and the investigation of Uchida for reportedly spying on Gupta. Gupta’s resignation became official on Tuesday, June 27, at the automaker’s general shareholders’ meeting.
* Hiroto Saikawa. Nissan’s former CEO, who would be ousted in September 2019 under a financial cloud, was on the receiving end of a Hari Nada email on November 18, 2018, the day before Ghosn’s arrest, outlining the plan to take back control of Nissan from Renault. The three-page memo outlined the plan to use Ghosn’s arrest to block a Renault takeover of the Japanese automaker.
Saikawa was also on the receiving end of a November 14, 2018 email from Nada entitled “Media support” in which Nada advised that “We should push for breach of trust reasons for [the] arrest supported by [a] media campaign for [the] insurance of destroying CG reputation hard enough. Particular attention should be given to France.” A screenshot from a Japanese TV news show displays the message below:
Saikawa then followed the November 18 plan, first speaking to the media at a late evening press conference on November 19 when he characterized Ghosn and Greg Kelly, a Ghosn ally on Nissan’s board who was also arrested, as masterminds of a still-unspecified financial crime. As detailed in an earlier article, that was false.
* Hidetoshi Imazu. The lead internal auditor at the time of Ghosn’s arrest, Imazu, while reviewing Ghosn’s executive perks, came across two issues he felt were irregular — a dispute over travel-related charges involving Nissan’s inhouse travel subsidiary and questions about Ghosn’s residences, all but one of which (there were five) were owned and managed by Nissan.
Instead of bringing the issues to the board, as he was required to do by law, he turned to the Tokyo prosecutor’s office, then launched a three-and-a-half-month secret investigation with several outside lawyers and a small anti-Ghosn faction within management.
In mid-October, he informed Saikawa that he had enlisted the Tokyo prosecutor’s office and that the prosecutor was moving forward with a criminal case against Ghosn. Saikawa kept the matter secret for another five weeks until the afternoon of Ghosn’s November 19 arrest when he informed members of the executive committee.
The prosecutor ultimately rejected Imazu’s executive perks claims and replaced them with one involving the concealment of future income from Japanese regulators, which three senior Japanese executives were involved with, including Saikawa.
* Hitoshi Kawaguchi. As a senior vice president in charge of governmental affairs, Kawaguchi was the link to both the Shinzo Abe and Yoshihide Suga administrations. In testimony at the trial of Greg Kelly, Kawaguchi admitted that he, Imazu and Nada were working together in secret to stop the Renault merger and to remove Ghosn from management.
* Toshiaki Ohnuma. The former head of Nissan’s secretariat became a key witness against Ghosn and Kelly in the Kelly trial. Among other things, he backdated stock appreciation rights bonuses for Saikawa and Nada, generating huge windfalls for both.
During the Kelly trial, Ohnuma successfully sought to shift blame away from Toshiyuki Shiga and Itaru Koeda, two former top executives, to Kelly and Ghosn for the decision to keep a running tally within the Secretariat of income Ghosn lost when he took a pay cut in March 2010.
Documents not in Ghosn’s possession until recently tell a different story.
* Masakazu Toyoda. A retired Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry official, Toyoda headed the board nomination committee and also served on Nagai’s audit committee.
Toyoda, who joined the board as an outside director in June 2018, is considered by Ghosn to be the “brains” behind the coup. He formally retired from the board last Tuesday.
The four who are charged with having physically entered Ghosn’s residences:
* Fabien Lesort. Still general counsel for Nissan’s Africa, the Middle East and India operations, Lesort led the raid on Ghosn’s office and residence on November 19, 2018. He allegedly entered both properties without warrants.
* Jimmy Dawson. Still employed at Nissan headquarters in the legal department, Dawson, since 2020, has taken on the added duty of general counsel for the Infiniti brand. His name can be found on multiple internal emails in summer 2019 in which Nissan’s legal team can be seen discussing ways to withhold evidence from Ghosn’s and Kelly’s lawyers.
Lesort and Dawson, in late October 2018, joined Nissan’s internal investigation, reporting to Christina Murray, Nissan’s former head of compliance, who is not named as a defendant in this lawsuit. Nada, according to our sources, instructed the two men to carry out the raid on Ghosn’s office and residence.
Following the Beirut raid, Lesort and Dawson brought the haul back to Japan, returning to a converted conference room on the 21st floor of Nissan headquarters that served as coup war room, whereupon another member of the team took everything to the Tokyo prosecutor’s office. The Tokyo prosecutor subsequently shared those materials with the French prosecutors.
* Salvador Dahan. Dahan, a former senior official in Nissan’s governance, risk, compliance and internal audit department based in Rio de Janeiro, was dispatched to try to retrieve Ghosn’s safe at Ghosn’s Rio de Janeiro apartment. (Murray, who reported to Nada, was the point person on the Rio de Janeiro operation.) Dahan left the automaker in 2021 and is currently employed by Petrobas in Brazil.
* Daniel Bernabé. Unlike Lesort and Dawson, Bernabé was based in Europe at the time of the raid.
He is still Nissan’s director of security for Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and Oceania, having added Oceania to his coverage area in 2021.
We reached out to Nissan for comment and received no response
Exclusive interview with Ghosn
Addressing the lawsuit and the current management turmoil at Nissan, Ghosn, now 69 and living in Lebanon out of reach of the Tokyo prosecutor’s office, is guardedly optimistic about the case. He clearly thinks he can win.
But whether a victory in a Lebanese court will be enough for him to win his freedom – which means, as a practical matter, getting his name removed from Interpol’s Red Notice list – remains to be seen.
Following are excerpts from the exclusive telephone interview:
Q: Why did you file your complaint in Lebanon?
Ghosn: We know that they broke our laws when they entered my residence and took personal belongings without a warrant.
Q: Might there be future complaints against, say, Renault or the lawyers at Latham & Watkins, including one who participated in the Beirut raid?
Ghosn: For the time being we’re focusing on this case. We need to concentrate our efforts to make sure it’s successful and there are consequences for the people who did this. But we’re absolutely not eliminating any possibility of future legal action elsewhere. I’m going to dedicate all the time necessary to get to the truth.
Q: Why didn’t you bring the case in the US?
Ghosn: I’m not an American citizen. I didn’t work in the US. Nissan’s not an American company. And the crime didn’t occur in the US. Obviously, if we could file a complaint in the US, it would be the best place because of the system of discovery, which doesn’t allow anybody to cheat.
Q: And to be clear, the $1.1 billion is for both lost compensation and damages?
Ghosn: Yes, $588 million for lost compensation and $500 million for damages.
Q: Why wasn’t Jean-Dominique Senard among the 11 defendants? Clearly, he was involved in the coverup at Renault following Thierry Bolloré’s call – in his capacity as a Nissan director – for an investigation of Nissan in October 2019.
Ghosn: He didn’t participate in the plot. He didn’t even join Renault until January of the following year. The crime was committed during and before the month of November in 2018. But Senard participated in everything that was done after to justify it. Look, Senard is a politician. He was clearly acting as an instrument of the French administration.
Q: But his name is on Bolloré’s October 8, 2019, letter to Nissan’s board three days before Bolloré got fired on October 11. Senard was the chairman of Renault. Bolloré was CEO. Bolloré warned Nissan’s board — including Senard — of possible criminal misconduct by Hari Nada and Motoo Nagai’s complicity in covering it up. It’s all there in the memo.
Ghosn: Yes, of course. Senard carries a big responsibility. His mission was to bring peace with the Japanese at all costs. As for the rest, his record speaks for itself. If you compare Renault’s situation in 2018 with their situation today, just look at the size of their sales to see how far they’ve fallen.
Q: From 3.9 million units in 2018 to 2.1 million units in 2022. That’s group sales.
Ghosn: They were one of the early leaders in electric cars. They had a huge technological platform. They had Fiat Chrysler Automobiles coming soon. Now they’re virtually alone. They lost Fiat Chrysler. They lost even their link with Nissan.
There is no real synergy going on between the two companies. They lost even their 42% voting rights. It has been brutal for Renault for the last four years. And at the head of the company they’ve got somebody who’s got absolutely zero interest in saying things the way they are.
Q: Senard?
Ghosn: Yes.
Ghosn: Yes. His legitimacy is based on my demise. He has no interest in saying what went wrong.
Q: So do you think Renault’s active efforts to pressure Nissan to join the Ampere electric car project, if we believe the media reports, are a sign of weakness?
Ghosn: Without any doubt.
Q: And then if you look at Nissan, it looks like their global market share is at 1970 levels.
Ghosn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a disaster. And most of the potential stars of the company have left.
Q: Look what Hyundai’s done since José Muñoz left Nissan and joined them.
Ghosn: Exactly.
Q: Back to the original compensation charges against you by the Tokyo prosecutor’s office: The record shows that they were fabricated – that Hiroto Saikawa signed three proposals for you to continue working at Nissan in a consulting/advisory capacity after your retirement; also that Toshiyuki Shiga and Itaru Koeda, in an earlier proposal, were the ones – not Greg Kelly, not you – who instructed the secretariat to keep a running tally of your lost income. Shiga was COO, Koeda a former co-chairman. Saikawa, Shiga and Koeda were not charged.
Ghosn: Yes. The compensation charge was the most important because they arrested me for it. It was a very weak charge. It was just to get me out of the system in a way that I couldn’t defend myself. And now the story continues. Look at the clash between Uchida and Gupta.
It’s as we’ve said from the beginning. It’s now in the open that they spy on each other. Of course, the spying was triggered by the French government’s wanting a full merger of the two companies. The Japanese decided that they were going to stop that no matter what it takes.
Q: How do you think this current scandal plays out?
Ghosn: It looks to me like Hari Nada joined the Gupta camp, which is the losing side. It looks like he backed the wrong horse. I can’t see him staying on too long after the shareholder’s meeting.
Roger Schreffler is a veteran of nearly four decades as a Japan automotive correspondent and is a former president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.