Nissan ex-boss protests innocence
At a high-profile court hearing in Japan, his first appearance since his arrest in November, Nissan ex-boss Carlos Ghosn said he had been “wrongly accused and unfairly detained”.
Entering the court on Tuesday handcuffed and with a rope around his waist, the oncerevered titan of the auto industry mounted a passionate defence against a string of financial misconduct allegations. He was thinner – his family says he has lost about 20kg due to the rice-based diet – and his hair was greying.
He appeared in a dark suit without a tie and wore plastic slippers. “I have been wrongly accused and unfairly detained based on meritless and unsubstantiated accusations,” he told the Tokyo district court.
Throughout proceedings, he showed no emotion and mostly faced forward or looked down, glancing occasionally at the gallery in the packed courtroom. The executive, 64, otherwise appeared in decent health, coughing occasionally.
In a career spanning decades, during which he won praise for turning around the struggling Japanese car maker, he said he had “always acted with integrity” and had never before been accused of wrongdoing.
“I’ve acted honourably, legally and with the knowledge and approval of the appropriate executives inside the company.”
From the moment on November 19 that prosecutors stormed his private jet at a Tokyo airport, the twists and turns of the Ghosn case have gripped Japan and the business world.
At one point, the FrancoLebanese-Brazilian tycoon appeared on the point of release, only for prosecutors to produce further allegations against him and continue his custody.
In an indication of the interest the case has sparked in Japan, about 1,000 people waited outside the court from the early hours in the hope of getting one of just 14 tickets for the public gallery. Tuesday’s hearing caught observers off guard as Ghosn’s lawyers deployed a rarely-used article of the Japanese constitution to force the court to explain his detention.
Judge Yuichi Tada read the charges and said he was being detained because he was a flight risk with a possibility he would conceal evidence.
The suspect has “bases in foreign countries” and “may escape”, Tada said.
Go Kondo, one of Ghosn’s lawyers, said: “There’s no risk he will run. He’s the CEO of French company Renault. He’s widely known so it’s difficult to escape.” Ghosn is expected to be kept in custody until Friday. His lawyer Motonari Otsuru said later they would appeal to the court for his release but it was unlikely to be granted. “I believe it could be Tickets compared to the 1,000 people waiting outside considered that six months will be needed before being able to go to the first trial,” said Otsuru. Ghosn faces a host of allegations of financial impropriety.
Prosecutors charged him over suspicions he under-declared some five billion yen (about R614m) from his salary in documents to investors over five fiscal years from 2010, apparently to avoid accusations he was paid too much.
Authorities also suspect he continued this scheme over the next three tax years, seeking to defer another four billion yen of his salary until after retirement. A third, more complex, accusation is that he sought to shift personal foreign exchange losses onto Nissan’s books and then paid a business contact from Saudi Arabia some $14.7m (R206m), supposedly from company funds, who allegedly stumped up collateral for him.
Ghosn hasn’t been formally charged over the latter two allegations and systematically rebutted all of them in court.
“I’ve never received compensation from Nissan that wasn’t disclosed,” he said, adding that Nissan never incurred any losses from his foreign exchange contracts and that the Saudi partner, Khaled Juffali, was “appropriately compensated” for “critical services that substantially benefited Nissan”.
A statement issued on behalf of Juffali’s company, the first since allegations emerged, said the compensation was for work done to benefit Nissan, including resolving a local business dispute and lobbying for the approval for a new plant in Saudi Arabia. –