AS IF the story of Carlos Ghosn was not larger than life already, his escape from Japan to Lebanon has just upped the potential box office receipts into megabucks territory from any movie they make on his life.
The queues into Amazon Prime and Netflix must stretch around the block as screenwriters would have already sensed the story of the auto industry’s most successful turnaround merchant was worthy of a telling in celluloid.
The screenwriters must have shaken their heads in disbelief at their good fortune when Ghosn was arrested in what looked for all the world like a palace coup at Nissan when, as he alleges, he was ambushed by rival company executives in league with the Japanese government and put in gaol.
His “crime” was a failure to disclose income he had yet to receive in an amount that had not been decided.
If anything was untoward, it was a clear internal matter and one that should have been dealt with by the board. To turn the matter over to the police and potentially make the saviour of Nissan a criminal was beyond belief. But a great yarn.
His detention and deprivation in an attempt to get him to confess – an apparent requirement in Japan whether you are guilty or not – added to the potential drama as Mr Ghosn made it clear that he wanted his day in court to clear his name; in spite of being deprived of access to his business records.
He said there was never a clear explanation of what he had done wrong.
He was held in solitary confinement for around 130 days and was also subject to daily cross examination without a lawyer present. Even on bail he was denied access to communications and to his wife, Carole.
Then, in a dire warning to any non-Japanese national who takes on a role in a Japanese conglomerate that turns on you, his house was raided while he was on bail and the prosecutors took away the legal advice and paperwork being prepared by his legal team for use in mounting his defence!
Such an act in most jurisdictions would see the trial tainted to the point of it being incapable of proceeding. But not in Japan. It is clear that the confiscation of his legal team’s defence papers led Mr Ghosn to the conclusion that he would never get justice in Japan.
Online humour: Within hours of news breaking that Carlos Ghosn has escaped from Japan, this graphic appeared online.
The Ghosn family decided that the Japanese legal system would never allow him to put his case properly because too many reputations would be at stake if he was found to be not guilty and Japan is a country where saving face is paramount.
But outside Japan, as Mr Ghosn has shown with this week’s two-and-a-half-hour press conference, he is now in a position to explain himself without limits.
He absconded, he said, because he feared the Japanese system was rigged against him and that he faced dying in Japan unless he escaped the country.
Mr Ghosn said that the core of his defence is that a coup was mounted against him in which, he alleged, prosecutors illegally conspired with some Nissan executives and government officials to frame Mr Ghosn and remove him from power to prevent plans by the chairman to integrate Nissan further into Renault.
So the family retained a paramilitary team, including a former Green Beret, which specialises in extracting from unfriendly countries those under detention – most commonly those kidnapped. These specialists charge millions on the basis of recovery of expenses incurred plus a success fee, also millions, when the subject has been extracted and is successfully out of harm’s way.
It was not a cheap exercise for Mr Ghosn. In addition to the extraction fees from the paramilitary team, he has forfeited the $A14 million he paid for his bail bond.
Nor was it a last-minute thing. It took months of planning.
Over a three-month period, they developed a plan to extract Mr Ghosn from his place of house arrest.
Operatives from the extraction team spread out across Japan to find a suitable airport where he could be smuggled aboard a flight out of the orient. They also needed to find a suitable destination airport that would expedite transit to a flight to Beirut without raising suspicion. They chose Istanbul.
As well, they needed suitable travel documents (his three passports were confiscated in Tokyo) for entry to Lebanon where a sympathetic government has welcomed their business hero home with great fanfare.
In the best traditions of Alfred Hitchcock, Mr Ghosn’s dramatic disappearance was made under disguise from his central Tokyo home and, after a rendezvous at a nearby five-star hotel, the team made a 500km dash by bullet train from Tokyo to Kansai International Airport in Osaka where he was smuggled onto a private jet.
The extraction team had spent months scouring airport security procedures for a loophole and found that large luggage being loaded onto private jets was escaping scrutiny in Osaka because it did not fit through the scanning machines in that section of Kansai International.
Mr Ghosn, placed inside an oversized box apparently meant for audio equipment, went onto the plane undetected and his transfer in Istanbul to a private jet to Beirut was made under the cloak of a massive downpour.
It is amazing that it has come to this; that the man who saved Nissan, Japan’s second-largest car-maker, and preserved 140,000 jobs in the process, should now spend the rest of his life as a fugitive avoiding countries with extradition treaties with Japan.
He is safe in Lebanon where he is apparently on good terms with the government (he met the prime minister within days of his arrival in Beirut) and where there had been very public protests imploring the Japanese government to release him. His image was put on a Lebanese stamp as recently as 2017.
Mr Ghosn is now free to continue to put his side of the story.
Given the fact that he can now basically speak unhindered by any party, it will be interesting to see how many stones he eventually turns over and to see the scurrying for cover that takes place at Nissan and in the Japanese justice ministry, both of which have this week issued fresh statements of Mr Ghosn’s guilt (even though there has been no trial).
It will make a great book and a fascinating film.
And Mr Ghosn might make more money in movie and book royalties than he ever made at Nissan.
By John Mellor on 9th January 2020 Comment, Free Access Articles Comment, Escapes, Ghosn, Japan
Carlos Ghosn
AS IF the story of Carlos Ghosn was not larger than life already, his escape from Japan to Lebanon has just upped the potential box office receipts into megabucks territory from any movie they make on his life.
The queues into Amazon Prime and Netflix must stretch around the block as screenwriters would have already sensed the story of the auto industry’s most successful turnaround merchant was worthy of a telling in celluloid.
The screenwriters must have shaken their heads in disbelief at their good fortune when Ghosn was arrested in what looked for all the world like a palace coup at Nissan when, as he alleges, he was ambushed by rival company executives in league with the Japanese government and put in gaol.
His “crime” was a failure to disclose income he had yet to receive in an amount that had not been decided.
If anything was untoward, it was a clear internal matter and one that should have been dealt with by the board. To turn the matter over to the police and potentially make the saviour of Nissan a criminal was beyond belief. But a great yarn.
His detention and deprivation in an attempt to get him to confess – an apparent requirement in Japan whether you are guilty or not – added to the potential drama as Mr Ghosn made it clear that he wanted his day in court to clear his name; in spite of being deprived of access to his business records.
He said there was never a clear explanation of what he had done wrong.
He was held in solitary confinement for around 130 days and was also subject to daily cross examination without a lawyer present. Even on bail he was denied access to communications and to his wife, Carole.
Then, in a dire warning to any non-Japanese national who takes on a role in a Japanese conglomerate that turns on you, his house was raided while he was on bail and the prosecutors took away the legal advice and paperwork being prepared by his legal team for use in mounting his defence!
Such an act in most jurisdictions would see the trial tainted to the point of it being incapable of proceeding. But not in Japan. It is clear that the confiscation of his legal team’s defence papers led Mr Ghosn to the conclusion that he would never get justice in Japan.
Online humour: Within hours of news breaking that Carlos Ghosn has escaped from Japan, this graphic appeared online.
The Ghosn family decided that the Japanese legal system would never allow him to put his case properly because too many reputations would be at stake if he was found to be not guilty and Japan is a country where saving face is paramount.
But outside Japan, as Mr Ghosn has shown with this week’s two-and-a-half-hour press conference, he is now in a position to explain himself without limits.
He absconded, he said, because he feared the Japanese system was rigged against him and that he faced dying in Japan unless he escaped the country.
Mr Ghosn said that the core of his defence is that a coup was mounted against him in which, he alleged, prosecutors illegally conspired with some Nissan executives and government officials to frame Mr Ghosn and remove him from power to prevent plans by the chairman to integrate Nissan further into Renault.
So the family retained a paramilitary team, including a former Green Beret, which specialises in extracting from unfriendly countries those under detention – most commonly those kidnapped. These specialists charge millions on the basis of recovery of expenses incurred plus a success fee, also millions, when the subject has been extracted and is successfully out of harm’s way.
It was not a cheap exercise for Mr Ghosn. In addition to the extraction fees from the paramilitary team, he has forfeited the $A14 million he paid for his bail bond.
Nor was it a last-minute thing. It took months of planning.
Over a three-month period, they developed a plan to extract Mr Ghosn from his place of house arrest.
Operatives from the extraction team spread out across Japan to find a suitable airport where he could be smuggled aboard a flight out of the orient. They also needed to find a suitable destination airport that would expedite transit to a flight to Beirut without raising suspicion. They chose Istanbul.
As well, they needed suitable travel documents (his three passports were confiscated in Tokyo) for entry to Lebanon where a sympathetic government has welcomed their business hero home with great fanfare.
In the best traditions of Alfred Hitchcock, Mr Ghosn’s dramatic disappearance was made under disguise from his central Tokyo home and, after a rendezvous at a nearby five-star hotel, the team made a 500km dash by bullet train from Tokyo to Kansai International Airport in Osaka where he was smuggled onto a private jet.
The extraction team had spent months scouring airport security procedures for a loophole and found that large luggage being loaded onto private jets was escaping scrutiny in Osaka because it did not fit through the scanning machines in that section of Kansai International.
Mr Ghosn, placed inside an oversized box apparently meant for audio equipment, went onto the plane undetected and his transfer in Istanbul to a private jet to Beirut was made under the cloak of a massive downpour.
It is amazing that it has come to this; that the man who saved Nissan, Japan’s second-largest car-maker, and preserved 140,000 jobs in the process, should now spend the rest of his life as a fugitive avoiding countries with extradition treaties with Japan.
He is safe in Lebanon where he is apparently on good terms with the government (he met the prime minister within days of his arrival in Beirut) and where there had been very public protests imploring the Japanese government to release him. His image was put on a Lebanese stamp as recently as 2017.
Mr Ghosn is now free to continue to put his side of the story.
Given the fact that he can now basically speak unhindered by any party, it will be interesting to see how many stones he eventually turns over and to see the scurrying for cover that takes place at Nissan and in the Japanese justice ministry, both of which have this week issued fresh statements of Mr Ghosn’s guilt (even though there has been no trial).
It will make a great book and a fascinating film.
And Mr Ghosn might make more money in movie and book royalties than he ever made at Nissan.
COMMENT by John Mellor
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