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The former chairman of Renault-Nissan
has left Japan and fled to Lebanon.
…former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn is on the run.
In Japan, when someone is arrested…
that person's life is over.
He built himself a shell
because he thought he was invincible.
He went from being a savior,
to eventually a suspected criminal.
He lost all his power.
He's become the naked king, completely naked.
Renault has recorded a net loss of 5,248,000,000 francs.
Louis Schweitzer, its president, says
these figures have put the manufacturer in the red for the first time in a decade.
The losses are still an issue.
He was very direct,
very focused on the issue at hand,
and not at all the kind of person who'd chat about the weather.
No small talk, as we say in English.
In the classical French system, there are lots of inheritors.
So people who are the nephews, grandchildren,
or the children of senior officials, ministers, or CEOs, etc.
Carlos Ghosn wasn't that at all.
Carlos Ghosn came from somewhere else, from a very different world.
He had absolutely no desire
to become part of the French establishment,
especially not in the Parisian environment, let's say.
I think that cost him dearly later on.
The other bosses didn't like him because he wasn't in their social circle.
They'd see each other at the opera, soccer matches, or meetings.
Carlos Ghosn never did any of that.
From the very start, he was an outsider.
Renault has announced that it will close its factory
in Vilvoorde, Belgium in July.
More than 3,000 jobs are at stake.
Renault has decided to cease production
at its Belgian factory.
The Cost Cutter, literally "The Reducer of Costs,"
Carlos Ghosn ruthlessly reorganized production.
Unbelievable!
The CEO of Renault, Louis Schweitzer,
isn't particularly known for his good humor.
But, today, he has every reason to smile.
Renault and Nissan are creating
the world's fourth-biggest automobile group.
A shared global partnership agreement has just been signed in Tokyo.
A global partnership in which Renault will invest 33 billion francs
to acquire just over a third of the Japanese capital.
What Mr. Ghosn came to was a car maker in total chaos.
A down-and-out Nissan, unable to make new cars
or produce any popular models.
Mr. Ghosn came shouldering the responsibility
of somehow rebuilding Nissan.
MURAYAMA FACTORY
Calling it an alliance
implies equality,
but this was no alliance.
Renault was above and Nissan was below.
It was a big surprise
for a company like Nissan
to bring in and accept a foreign CEO.
Mmm. Very surprising.
I, too, as a business reporter,
had the impression
that Japan was being taken over by another country.
I felt like we had lost a war and were now
being occupied.
I understood that having no choice
but to accept a foreigner as the president
of such a company was like losing a war,
like we'd lost an economic war.
He visited the factories across Japan in person.
He wanted to seem friendly, caring, and generous
toward his workers
in order to show
that he wasn't the sort of person to rashly fire people.
I thought,
"Could this middle-aged guy really be such a revolutionary?"
That was my initial impression of him.
He was short and bald back then,
and he wore these out-of-fashion glasses.
In that sense, it seemed like he had no relation to
the fashionable country of France.
It was in the autumn of 1999
that the idea was to present a plan to revive Nissan in three years.
In order to make
the Nissan revival plan a success,
depends on how much…
Ghosn was already known
as a cost-cutter in his work with Michelin and Renault.
So Nissan employees
really feared they would lose their jobs.
After Ghosn came,
my main job was to lay people off.
21,000 EMPLOYEE CUTBACK
He gave directions and set specific figures that had to be met,
and were impossible to achieve with the way we had been working until then.
Stop factory closures!
Stop the Renault/Nissan conspiracy!
But if anyone complained,
they were cut off.
Especially if the complaints were made towards Ghosn.
When I first met Mr. Ghosn to interview him,
he was so sure that he wouldn't fail.
The next 15 minutes is important,
because no one is here yet and he can work on his own
with no one to bother him.
He checks his emails.
He was 100% sure of success.
Failure never even occurred to him.
I would also like to welcome our friends from the French press.
Today, I am proud to be Lebanese.
A country that has stood by me in difficult times.
In Japanese culture, the biggest holiday of the year
is New Year's Day.
Carlos Ghosn missed this first meeting,
which notably included suppliers.
He was supposed to open a barrel of sake using an axe
and wish everyone happiness.
If you don't do that, it's really frowned upon.
He wasn't there. He'd gone on vacation.
WELCOME EVERYONE, TO THE NISSAN IWAKI FACTORY!
He had a lot of charisma.
Everyone would get nervous
and would be in awe when they met him.
Mr. Ghosn wasn't handsome.
I thought he looked like Mr. Bean.
But I couldn't say that out loud because I'd get in trouble.
Why are you laughing?
He never smelled of alcohol.
And, of course, he didn't smoke.
He was always serious.
He was early to rise and early to bed.
I'd prepare his daily breakfast in a bottle
the day before.
There'd be oatmeal with coconut milk, maqui berry powder,
one stick of seaweed brain powder
which cost about 1,000 yen per stick.
I'd blend it all in a blender until it was thick and purple,
and that's what he'd have every morning.
He looked good in a suit and he seemed powerful.
I don't know how to explain it.
Now, a meeting with Ghosn
always meant numbers.
He'd bring out a ton of figures
and all this data.
He'd speak so quickly,
stunning everyone into acceptance.
I suppose it's a sort of
performative magic.
People at Nissan said there was a "Ghosn premium."
And that just having Ghosn as a manager
made the company more valuable in the eyes of investors.
That was Ghosn's position in the automotive industry.
He wanted to show that the GT-R
was like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
NISSAN TEST DRIVE SITE
Meaning that the car was actually very easy to drive.
…almost 100 kph.
He let me drive it.
That was 200 kph… 200 kph!
Then suddenly at 60 kph…
But what I ended up feeling then
was that Ghosn loved cars
the way little boys do.
Basically, he loved the attention of the media.
He was very famous.
It was a kind of Ghosn mania. That's clear.
I thought he might be scary
but seeing him in person, he's playful.
He even waved!
He was in all the magazines.
He was treated like a star.
He was good at managing his own stage presence.
In other words, figuring out how to make his own fan club
was extremely important.
What Ghosn did was build a fan base within Nissan
and secured his place as CEO.
I think that's something very similar to what a politician does.
GO IWAKI!
That was when mangas started drawing his portrait
and writing his story to appear in comics.
His face lent itself well to it.
He had thick black eyebrows.
He was very easy to draw.
This is me and Mr. Ghosn.
And this one is Mr. Ghosn with our staff and me.
He's so famous that almost everyone knows him.
Thanks to Mr. Ghosn,
people found out about our restaurant
and we became busy.
He'd sit at this counter.
His favorite yakitori was
kashiwa, chicken breast.
A small revolution in the automotive world.
The Renault group is changing leaders.
Louis Schweitzer hands the baton to Carlos Ghosn,
the current CEO of Nissan…
I'm really happy to be back in France
to take the reins as CEO of a company as innovative and enthusiastic as Renault.
He could have delegated.
He could also have chosen someone Japanese who was familiar with both cultures, etc.
He didn't do that. He didn't try.
He wanted to maintain control over Nissan.
And that was a fatal error, in my opinion,
for the alliance, Nissan, Renault, and himself.
I think he paid dearly in the end.
They say he only spent one week out of the month in Japan.
The rest was either in France or America.
A CEO actively managing two huge, global companies
was unheard of, only Carlos Ghosn did that.
But nobody was able to make him understand that it wasn't possible
for him to run two companies of that size 10,000 km apart,
spending his whole life on planes, being torn between the two.
It really isn't the best way to understand the region, the people,
to see the teams and understand what was really going on.
That was the start of the disconnect.
In total,
we are going to launch 26 cars within the plan's timeframe.
Increase our sales by 800,000 vehicles in 2009
compared to 2006.
We are going to double our volume growth in half the time.
His biggest goal was to earn a profit
and distribute it to the shareholders.
As for how he treated personnel
using the talented and discarding the useless…
I think it was very different
from management styles in Japan back then.
I think that Ghosn's proximity to the troops, as we call them,
was really, really bad.
Carlos Ghosn decided overnight
that they needed to cut costs by 30% within the Technocentre.
They were obliged to sign in blood, pretty much,
well, obviously not,
but they had to sign promising to give their heart and soul to it.
In early 2006,
my husband was working at least 12 hours a day.
That also included weekends.
The last two months, he was working more than 90 hours a week.
He regularly exceeded 100 hours.
So, it was really ridiculous.
Then, in the early afternoon, I got a call from the police.
What I first thought was that he had been in a car accident.
But that obviously wasn't the case.
My husband committed suicide by jumping off a footbridge.
Two other people had already jumped from the same footbridge before him.
One of them died,
and the other hurt himself seriously and ended up in a wheelchair, paralyzed.
There were three suicides in four months. That's when the press jumped on the story.
Is there a collective sickness among Renault staff?
The question must be asked again
following the suicide of a 44-year-old employee.
I saw him lose almost eight kilograms in six weeks.
I saw him crying every night.
I saw him spending his nights and weekends working.
I saw him no longer knowing where he was.
He told me he wouldn't be forgiven, that no mistake would be forgiven.
It's Renault's misconduct that won't be forgiven.
I worked at the Technocentre back then.
It really was something we had never experienced before.
There was a sort of loss of meaning, of soul,
and people were so desperate that they took their own lives.
We would never have imagined that could happen at Renault.
So I wrote to Carlos Ghosn.
I thought that he might respond if I addressed it directly to him.
He didn't answer me.
Of course that's to be expected.
I don't know if he's the sole person responsible.
But he is responsible for the pressure he put on the company,
for what he encouraged in terms of management methods.
Car manufacturer Renault is guilty of gross negligence.
Gross negligence.
Gross negligence in the suicide…
…the court determined that the carmaker
"should have been aware of the danger."
The company absolutely does not take this kind of tragedy lightly.
This affects us all,
and there will be consequences in terms of management and the attention…
What I am realizing by talking to you
is that the pain has eased, but the anger has not.
I am still full of rage.
I am… The rage is still there.
The pain has eased somewhat, but the anger has not.
In Japan, it has been compulsory
to disclose the amount of remuneration
if you are paid more than 100 million yen since 2010.
And that was when we realized that Carlos Ghosn's salary
was seven times higher than that of Toyota's CEO.
Well, for someone like me…
when I saw the publicized income for Carlos Ghosn,
I thought it was absurdly high.
It was beyond our imagination.
He thought he wasn't being paid enough.
And by that time, Mr. Ghosn was starting to lose
what you may call his "superhuman powers."
Ford said, well, the founder of Ford said,
"To ensure a good atmosphere in my company,
I should not be earning more than 20 times what the basic worker makes."
This is "the sharing day." What do you think of that comment?
To start with, you said "Ford said that," but Ford doesn't apply this rule.
The CEO of Ford is currently the highest paid CEO in the industry.
And he makes three times what I do. Just so you know.
I've never seen him excessively spend money.
He was quite conservative and took care of his things.
As for his shirts,
he'd wear them until the collar and underarms
turned yellow.
Also, this button here.
He gained some weight and the neck became a bit tight,
so he asked me to
adjust them all by one centimeter inwards.
He really valued and took care of his money.
Maybe that's why he was good at saving.
LEBANON
He started to change his appearance.
It was always said that he wore shoes with thicker soles
to make him appear taller.
But his hair is obviously a hair transplant.
We've finally achieved a 5% market share, which was the first step.
Oh, his hair…
I suppose he has more hair…
compared to before.
I don't know if he grew taller,
but he definitely has more hair now.
Then he got rid of his glasses
and got Lasik,
laser eye surgery for nearsightedness.
I wouldn't say that Carlos Ghosn was the Emperor…
I don't know if he thought he was God or something,
but no one was allowed to defy him.
In my eyes, his feet no longer touched the ground.
He had launched into the stratosphere.
He ended up being surrounded by people who'd only tell him he was great, etc.,
so he lost all sense of reality.
That contributed to his paranoia and his fear of conspiracies against him.
They were accused of selling Renault's information
to spies in China.
Yes? Hello.
Hello, Patrick.
- How are you? - Good.
I'm meeting with you today
because we have found out that you did something serious.
What?
We're talking about industrial espionage.
I am appalled that you would do something like this.
Sorry, I must not have fully woken up this morning.
I don't understand.
To be completely transparent, some of your sidekicks
are being interviewed in nearby offices as we speak.
They are suspected of the same offenses.
-You are at the center of a strategy-- - But it's--
- You've done something stupid. - I haven't done anything.
It was stupid, and it was an error.
You know all this better than I do, Michel.
I don't know anything.
I really don't know what you're talking about.
I know nothing. I understand nothing.
This means that your career, your family, everything is over.
As soon as you leave this room, you are also leaving Renault, Michel.
The thing is, I don't want to be in deep shit for something I didn't do.
You're the one who knows, Michel.
That was our first day back in the office after the holidays.
We went around the offices
to greet everyone and tell them, "Happy New Year."
Then, first thing in the morning, we heard a rumor
that three people had been fired.
We were soon told we could not even talk to them
if they called us.
Where are we?
Is this Stalin's USSR?
Three Renault employees, three high-level executives,
are suspected of leaking trade secrets.
Three people at the heart of the group have been fired
for divulging strategic information regarding electric cars.
An embarrassing scandal for management.
I was kicked out of this company like a dog.
Renault has made serious allegations,
which I totally refute.
I've not touched any money. I do not have any foreign bank accounts.
I've been transparent. The investigation is now in the hands of the law.
Our guest tonight is Carlos Ghosn. Good evening.
-Good evening. -Thank you for joining us.
As you know, there are many questions surrounding this case.
Did you have formal evidence of their culpability?
Listen, we have certitudes. We wouldn't be here if we didn't.
What you need to know--
The accused employees were not spies,
they were victims of blackmail.
Yes or no, was there a case of industrial espionage at Renault?
The management team is beginning to show its doubts.
We were all embarrassed.
Everyone was laughing at Renault,
at Carlos Ghosn in particular.
Then finally, a month later,
I can't quite remember the order,
he went back on TV.
-Carlos Ghosn, good evening. -Good evening.
In January, you claimed to have certitudes
and a multitude of evidence of espionage.
It's now become clear that you were wrong, to say the least.
What is your conclusion tonight?
Listen, I was mistaken.
We were mistaken.
And according to the conclusions we have heard from the Paris prosecutor,
it seems that we were deceived.
There's a French expression, "The fish rots from the head down."
We clearly thought upper management had gone crazy.
It was really the beginning of the end for Carlos Ghosn
and the alliance, I'd say.
At this point, you invite the people
who have contributed to this alliance,
not just some friends and, I don't know,
some VIPs and celebrities, such as Cherie Blair.
It was over the top.
It was inappropriate at the very least.
My first reaction was, "Is he an idiot?"
I couldn't believe it.
I took an interest in Renault
because of the behavior of its CEO.
You're dealing with someone who appears to be both a cost killer,
so someone who reduces overhead costs,
who is simultaneously setting up, overseas, out of sight of everyone,
namely Renault and Nissan shareholders,
a giant piggy bank.
He organized
some schemes
that allowed him to embezzle huge sums of money
to buy villas, to buy a yacht,
to buy jewelry.
We can estimate the value of the properties purchased abroad
by Mr. Ghosn, under the guise of entities,
and the sums add up to serious amounts.
I think he was a magician in the sense that
he had so much money to work with…
that he was a mastermind at creating a system
that allowed him to do with it what he will.
I hate to say this,
but in my opinion,
the executives at Nissan completely relied on Mr. Ghosn.
They were overly dependent on him.
No one criticized him, and let him do what he wanted.
However, from Nissan's perspective,
I believe they concluded that they wouldn't gain anything
from merging with Renault.
Carlos Ghosn,
Chairman of the Board of Directors of Nissan, Japan…
The emblematic CEO of Renault-Nissan, Carlos Ghosn,
was arrested in Japan today.
My thought was, "So he was finally arrested."
What's incredible is
that the TV stations in Japan had been warned
that he was going to be arrested, and they were there waiting for him.
I remember running Japanese articles through Google Translate
to try and understand what was happening.
We started to understand things
when we saw Hiroto Saikawa's press conference.
That's when we realized something incredible was happening.
It was like Game of Thrones, Nissan edition.
It was just totally crazy.
We are furious…
and for me personally…
I feel strong disappointment.
The problem is one person having so much power.
It's the dark side of the Ghosn era that lasted many years.
In Japan, among those who are…
charged with a crime,
99% of them are found guilty.
In Japan, if someone is arrested…
that person's life is over.
I met him for the very first time on February 14th, 2019.
It was Valentine's Day.
By that time, he had been in custody for three months already.
Mr. Ghosn was questioned every day after he was arrested.
The questionings are not the kind of conversations
one might have over tea and cake.
Lawyers in Japan often refer to this arrangement
as the "hostage justice."
It's a world where time moves backwards.
A character named the White Queen appears in Alice in Wonderland.
And the White Queen's world moves backwards in time.
That's exactly how a trial is held in Japan.
Punishment comes first.
Then comes the trial.
Then they're judged at the very end.
So time really moves backwards.
After many negotiations with the court,
he was released on bail of one billion yen.
At the time, we negotiated with the detention house
so we could get him out the back door.
But for some reason, Tokyo Detention House didn't approve it.
We dressed up Mr. Carlos Ghosn in a Japanese workman's outfit.
Then we loaded him onto a small truck upon his release.
His disguise
was just so pitiful…
The fact that his disguise was basically visible proof that he was
not on the side of justice,
made me feel extremely sad.
You hardly ever get a chance to
chase a foreigner, let alone someone famous like Ghosn.
I never dreamt I'd do such a thing.
After he was released on bail,
my job as a tabloid journalist was to follow his every move.
It was absolute chaos back then.
It was basically a media scrum.
We chronicled his daily activities for a whole year,
but we never saw him drive a Nissan.
He knew that he was constantly being watched.
There was a surveillance camera
installed at the entrance of his house.
So anyone that visited him, the exact time he left the house,
were all recorded as footage.
The mastermind of the escape was Michael Taylor,
a former American special forces agent
who must have organized a network of ex-combat and private security personnel
to help him research the elaborate escape plan.
I think he was already planning his escape
when he was released on bail.
That's what I believe.
I heard that whenever he met with anyone,
he usually met them at the Grand Hyatt.
Sometimes he went by car,
and sometimes he walked.
It's not an exaggeration to say he went out every day.
So the pictures and videos all started to look the same.
He wanted the investigators and guards
to think going to the Grand Hyatt was part of his daily routine
and that he wasn't going for any special reason.
I'm guessing that he even knew
where all the cameras were placed.
At the time, he wasn't allowed
to communicate with anyone involved in the case.
So, according to the final bail conditions,
Carlos Ghosn
couldn't meet, talk, or even send letters to his wife Carol.
That condition was added.
I found it extremely difficult to have to inform him
of this condition.
We ask the president to put pressure on the Japanese government
to respect human rights and the right to a defense
or to let Carlos be tried in France.
You want him to be tried in France?
I think so, because we can see that he won't get a fair trial in Japan.
No matter how many times we tried,
the date of the trial was never settled.
Faced with this situation,
Ghosn wondered how long he'd have to be in Japan.
He started asking when the trial would happen
and whether he would be able
to receive a fair trial.
He began to ask this often.
After he got arrested,
posters appeared in Beirut supporting the Lebanese businessman Carlos Ghosn.
You can't understand Carlos Ghosn,
his motivation, what drives him, this desire to succeed,
this desire to win and to show that he's the best,
without understanding the pain of his childhood.
We found an article about Father Boulos Massaad,
who was found dead one evening in April 1960.
He was shot twice.
And near the scene the crime
a Peugeot belonging to Carlos Ghosn's father was seen.
What we came to understand
is that the priest, Boulos Massaad, was being used by George Ghosn
to smuggle diamonds from Africa.
He was tried and sentenced to death.
Then in the mid-1970s, civil war had just broken out in Lebanon.
He managed to escape from prison and found refuge in Brazil.
You can imagine,
spending his childhood with his father in prison accused of murder,
even sentenced to death for murdering a priest,
would be really hard.
Carlos Ghosn created his own legend his whole life.
ONE LAST SECRET
The account of a life that wasn't exactly the one he lived.
So he probably felt this need
to show all the people he grew up with,
to say to them, "Look how successful I've become in spite of my background,
in spite of my father's story, of my life."
"There you go. I've achieved great things."
I saw him for the last time on the 26th.
He came up to me and said,
"Keiko…" "I'm going to pay you."
I was surprised because he didn't have to pay me yet.
But he asked for all my receipts
and paid me.
He told me to choose any wine I wanted
and he gifted me two bottles.
He asked to take a picture together.
He'd never asked before, so it made me very happy.
He even gave me a hug.
He's not usually the type of person who gives hugs.
So I think he gave me a hug because
he was going to run.
He knew it was the last time,
so he gave me the gift, the hug, and even took a picture with me.
It made me happy.
On the 29th, Michael Taylor
flew into Kansai International Airport from Dubai on a private jet.
Carlos Ghosn left his house at 2:30 p.m. on the 29th.
I left the house wearing normal clothes.
So if someone saw me on the street, they would recognize me.
Ghosn arrived at the Grand Hyatt.
When I left the hotel, I wore something I don't usually wear.
He met with his three accomplices at the hotel.
I left the hotel to go to the airport,
which means you have to take a taxi, then the train.
You'll be on the train for two or three hours surrounded by people.
You mustn't draw attention.
There was no way I could walk through the airport with my face.
At Shin-Osaka, they took another taxi.
From there…
they headed to the hotel that Michael Taylor had reserved,
which is connected to Kansai International Airport.
I had to get on the plane without anyone seeing me.
How do you get on a plane without being seen? The check-in baggage.
From that moment on,
Carlos Ghosn did not appear on any CCTV cameras.
You can say he disappeared.
When they left the hotel,
it was around 10:00 p.m.,
9:57 p.m. to be precise.
The issue was to get on the plane, inside a box,
without going through the X-ray.
We decided Osaka would be the right place.
And it also had to be done at the end of the year.
Why? Because people go on holiday then.
So permanent staff are away, and they're replaced by temporary staff.
Temporary staff aren't as knowledgeable on procedures.
It took about four to five people including myself
to lift the large box.
One of the staff members joked,
"Maybe there's a beautiful young woman in the box."
Mr. Taylor told me
they were violinists…
…but I did feel that it was strange.
The two men had a guitar case instead of a violin case.
The crucial stage was getting through security.
This was the moment Ghosn was most likely to be discovered.
It was vital the box did not go through the X-ray machine.
When you are at a point in your life…
…when it's all or nothing…
…to know how to react in case something happens.
The surprising, exciting events in Carlos Ghosn's story…
I was happy for him and wanted to cheer for him.
He could finally see his family…
I was truly happy for him.
I shed tears of joy for him.
But at the same time, I was sad.
But I think it was tears of joy.
I judged that the evidence was not strong enough
to find him guilty.
If he really stands on the side of justice,
why did he have to go so far
as to hide in a miserable black box to flee?
I feel quite disappointed.
Now he is stuck forever.
And he's lost all his power, lost everything he loved.
He's become the naked king, completely naked.