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After eight months exposing one of the world’s largest automotive alliances, a Tokyo court is asking itself a fundamental question: Was Carlos Ghosn a leader that Nissan couldn’t afford to keep or couldn’t afford to lose?
The man actually tried in the Tokyo district court is Greg Kelly, a gray-haired Tennessee lawyer who worked at Nissan for 30 years before his arrest in 2018 accused of conspiring to hide the true scale of Ghosn’s $ 87 million salary.
But as the trial progresses, prosecutors and defense have increasingly focused on forensics in Ghosn. The former Nissan chair would have been on the dock himself if he hadn’t to sleepd Tokyo for Lebanon in 2019.
This approach in the absent Ghosn has presented to the court two diametrically opposed images of the man.
Prosecutors, through witnesses ranging from former senior executives to relatively low-level employees, have described Ghosn as a feared autocrat. According to witnesses, Ghosn’s word inside Nissan was law, his greed was out of control and his plans would end up hurting Nissan.
One of them, who testified behind an opaque screen, told the court that in his ten years working for Ghosn he had gone from believing he was surrounded by a “special aura” to thinking he was motivated by greed. “I’m not sure if the obsession is the right expression,” the witness said.
This version of Ghosn, according to prosecutors, was a man who would naturally order Kelly to build a mechanism to hide the size of his salary if it suited his ambition to maintain a particular image in France and Japan.
Meanwhile, Kelly’s team has introduced Ghosn as an executive of the future on whom Nissan absolutely depended. As the company grew from crisis to crisis, including the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the unfair abandonment of Renault staff on suspicion of corporate espionage, Ghosn became a “risk of retention. “growing.
Nissan was very worried that Ghosn would join a rival company and would probably bring a significant number of executives with it if it did, Kelly told the court.
Kelly’s testimony has challenged the idea that Nissan executives feared Ghosn would force the Japanese company into ever-increasing commitments to its French partner Renault. Kelly said the main reason behind his retention was “to provide his services to Nissan and protect Nissan’s independence from Renault.”
Greg Kelly’s legal team says Nissan’s future depended on preserving Ghosn’s services © AP
According to Kelly and other former Nissan executives, concerns about Ghosn’s retention intensified after his pay was cut to address a change in Japan’s rules on compensation disclosure introduced in 2010. Ghosn, who was one of the most executive well-paid from Japan, he feared that the disclosure of his full salary would provoke a public backlash and demotivate Nissan employees.
The central question for the judges is whether Ghosn instructed Nissan executives to find ways to pay him what he expected, but only by declaring the amount reduced, or whether the company filed a new compensation plan on its own. because he feared losing his CEO. A crucial additional question is whether he would have actually provided services for his post-retirement compensation.
In January, Toshiyuki Shiga, Nissan’s former chief operating officer, said Ghosn told him to think of ways to receive unpaid pay after retirement. He took it as a directive from his boss even though he was aware of the “legal risk” of not revealing it.
The change in Japanese rules coincided with pressure from the French government to reduce Ghosn’s pay and reduce his influence as chief executive of Renault, which is owned by 15% of the French state. Ghosn felt increasingly frustrated by both the French government and his salary, Kelly told judges last week.
“There was a time in July or September when he was seriously considering retiring at the age of 60 [March 2014]”If he retired from legal affairs.” If he retired at 60, he was still a young man and could have a full-time role as chief executive of any car company anywhere in the world. “
Concerned that Ghosn would leave Nissan, Kelly said he consulted with Hiroto Saikawa, Ghosn’s hand-picked successor as chief executive. They agreed that Nissan should consider a post-retirement payment for Ghosn through a non-compete and consulting agreement.
In February, Saikawa, who left the post of CEO of Nissan in late 2019, also said he shared the view that Ghosn had become a retention risk, adding that it was not surprising that “a person with such huge success ”had a high demand.
“Seva [Saikawa’s] the vision was that it was worth $ 100 million over a period of years, “Kelly said.” Many of Nissan’s best ideas had come from Mr. Ghosn. If you came up with two ideas worth $ 50 million and you know that would do it, would pay the contract ”.
According to excerpts from Ghosn’s statements to prosecutors, the former president said he never applied for the post-retirement contract and did not find the terms desirable, so there was no formal agreement with Nissan on his deferred compensation.
The case continues.
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