Good on Carlos Ghosn for filing his lawsuit against Nissan Motor Co. and others, including Hari Nada, as reported in Automotive News.
Things you won’t have heard since Ghosn fled to Lebanon:
In 2020, a UN panel found that Ghosn’s detention in a Japanese jail for more than 100 days was neither necessary nor reasonable and violated his rights. The decision to arrest Ghosn four times in a row so as to extend his detention was “fundamentally unfair,” according to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
Greg Kelly, who was also arrested at the same time as Ghosn and spent over three years of prosecution in Japan, was acquitted on seven of eight counts and given a suspended sentence. He was in pain for much of this time as he needed spinal surgery. He spent 37 days in solitary confinement and initially without winter clothing, despite freezing temperatures. Lights were on in his cell 24–7 and he was interrogated for four to six hours a day without his lawyer, with whom he couldn’t communicate. He wasn’t allowed to stand up and walk for exercise.
I said all along this was a boardroom coup and these two men’s reputations have been destroyed.
Hiroto Saikawa says Nissan must not allow power to be concentrated on one person again.
Yet isn’t that what he seeks?
— Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) November 23, 2018
Finally, we hear Carlos Ghosn’s side of the story, if ever so briefly, after days of having the narrative driven by @Nissan and Saikawa, including a trial by Japanese media to justify their aggression toward two foreigners. Classic boardroom coup. https://t.co/2zQfHYMTpG
— Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) November 27, 2018
Kelly’s charges included conspiracy to alter eight years of official financial reports, which were written in Japanese, which he doesn’t read, write or speak.
If he hadn’t had support from the US Embassy and a top Japanese defence lawyer, I wonder if he’d have been exonerated.
Other executives had evidence to help him but couldn’t head to Japan for fear of being arrested as well.
Kelly’s case largely demonstrates that there was no crime and the Japanese authorities’ Interpol red notice on Ghosn remains unfair in this context.
Kelly’s US lawyer put the saga well in an article by Roger Schreffler: ‘What a barbaric and disgusting turn of events.’
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