Carlos Ghosn, Mum on Tokyo Escape, Unleashes a Rambling Defense In Beirut, the fugitive ex-Nissan chairman made his first public comments since he fled Japan at news conference and in an interview with The New York Times.
Carlos Ghosn at a news conference in Beirut on Wednesday.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
By
Ben Dooley,
Vivian Yee and
David Yaffe-Bellany - Jan. 8, 2020Updated 6:55 p.m. ET
BEIRUT, Lebanon — It was part corporate presentation, part legal defense, part rambling tirade.
For more than two hours on Wednesday, Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan executive who fled house arrest in Japan and surfaced in Lebanon last month, launched an impassioned defense of his decision to escape, portraying himself as the victim of
a rigged justice system and
a corporate coup by disloyal underlings.
By the end of the day, sitting at a conference room table with his wife, Mr. Ghosn seemed less defiant than tired. In an interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that he had regrets. The biggest: He wished he had retired before everything unraveled.
Mr. Ghosn, who led an auto empire
that spanned continents, was arrested in late 2018 and charged with financial wrongdoing. The reporters who gathered to hear him speak at a Beirut news conference had hoped for an account of his daring international escape — a dash across Japan to a chartered jet that carried him out of the country.
Instead, they were treated to a wide-ranging and sometimes hard-to-follow defense against the charges that Japanese prosecutors had leveled against him. He attacked the authorities in Tokyo as well as executives at Nissan.
Japanese prosecutors responded on Wednesday with a statement issued soon after Mr. Ghosn’s conference ended, saying that he had been deemed a flight risk, which “is obvious from the fact that he actually fled and illegally departed from the country.”
“His statements during his press conference today failed to justify his acts,”
the Tokyo prosecutor’s office said. Mr. Ghosn, speaking in English, French and Arabic during the news conference, said he was the victim of “character assassination” and “political persecution.”
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Create an account or log in In the interview with The Times, Mr. Ghosn was mum on the details of his escape, except to say that “there is a lot of imagination” in some media accounts of his brazen flight.
Mr. Ghosn expressed optimism about his future, including the odds that he will be welcomed back into elite company. Since his arrival in Lebanon, he said, a number of prominent organizations, including an Ivy League university, have courted him for possible speaking engagements.
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Below are highlights of Mr. Ghosn’s first day speaking to the press about his arrest and escape:
Video
TRANSCRIPT
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‘I Was Left With No Other Choice,’ Ghosn Says of Fleeing Japan For the first time since he fled Japan more than a week ago, Carlos Ghosn, the former auto executive, told his story to the public. I have not experienced a moment of freedom since Nov. 19, 2018. It is impossible, it is impossible to express the depths of that deprivation, and my profound appreciation to once again be able to be reunited with my family and loved ones. I did not escape justice. I fled injustice and persecution — political persecution. Having endured more than 400 days of inhumane treatment in a system designed to break me and unwilling to provide me even minimal justice, I was left with no other choice but to protect myself and my family. It was a difficult decision, and a risk one only takes if resigned to the impossibility of a fair trial.
00:00
0:57
0:57‘I Was Left With No Other Choice,’ Ghosn Says of Fleeing Japan
For the first time since he fled Japan more than a week ago, Carlos Ghosn, the former auto executive, told his story to the public.CreditCredit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Mr. Ghosn looks toward his ‘Mission Impossible.’ As an international fugitive, Mr. Ghosn faces an uncertain future. He is intent on clearing his name, but it is unclear what legal route he could take.
“I am used to what you call Mission Impossible,” he said at the news conference, responding to a question from a reporter about whether he will spend the rest of his life as a fugitive. He added: “I would be willing to stand trial anywhere where I think I could have a fair trial.”
Mr. Ghosn is a citizen of France, Brazil and Lebanon.
Asked whether he would consider going to France, Mr. Ghosn said he was content in Lebanon. “I’m very happy to be here,” he said. “I’m with my friends, I’m with my family, my kids can come visit me. I can use the phone, I can use the internet.”
In recent days, officials in France have hardened their stance on Mr. Ghosn, calling him a “defendant like any other” and saying he should face justice in a court of law. He treated the conference as a boardroom. Mr. Ghosn began his speech as if he were giving a corporate presentation, promising a point-by-point defense and projecting documents onto a screen.
He outlined the minutiae of the case against him and discussed specific emails and statements to prosecutors, complete with a presentation of documents to support his argument. But there was a problem: The text was too small for anyone in the room to read.
He noted that both of his companies had fared worse without him. “By the way, the market cap decrease of Nissan is more than $10 billion,” he said. “By the way, Renault is not better. … The market cap of Renault went down by more than $5 billion.”
“As a shareholder of Nissan, I say, ‘Who is protecting me?’” he said.
Nissan ‘colluded’ with prosecutors, he said. Mr. Ghosn pushed his theory that his arrest was the work of Nissan executives motivated by the fact that Nissan’s performance had begun to decline.
And, he said, the charge of underreporting income isn’t one that should have landed him in jail.
Mr. Ghosn has also claimed the charges against him were an effort by Nissan and Japanese officials to prevent a merger with Renault.
Taking questions from reporters, he said that rather than a merger, he had proposed creating a holding company that would have had one board of directors but allowed Nissan and Renault to continue operating as separate companies.
Mr. Ghosn says he was a victim of ‘character assassination.’ He defended a lavish party that he held at the
Palace of Versailles in 2016 that has been the subject of an investigation by French prosecutors. At question is whether the party was a misuse of company money, because it coincided with Mr. Ghosn’s wedding to his second wife, Carole, and with her 50th birthday.
Mr. Ghosn said the party had emerged from a pre-existing relationship between Versailles and the auto alliance.
Still, he said, “obviously this is not a very cheap party.”
One of the major public criticisms of Mr. Ghosn has involved houses that reports have said Nissan bought for his benefit. The properties include those in Rio de Janeiro and Beirut.
On Wednesday, Mr. Ghosn argued that the houses had been bought with the assent of top officials at Nissan. He displayed documents that he said showed that Greg Kelly, his onetime lieutenant, and Hiroto Saikawa, his successor as chief executive and one of the company officials he blames for his downfall, had signed off on the purchases.
The criminal charges against Mr. Ghosn in Japan do not include the properties. But Mr. Ghosn said the accusations had been leaked as part of a Nissan smear campaign.
“This is part of the character assassination,” he said.
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Mr. Ghosn: ‘I did not escape justice. I fled injustice.’ Image
Mr. Ghosn displayed numerous documents at his news conference in Beirut.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Since his arrest, Mr. Ghosn and his family have denounced the Japanese justice system, arguing that he has been a victim of
“injustice and political persecution.” His comments followed a similar line.
“I have not experienced a moment of freedom since Nov. 19, 2018,” he told the room of reporters. “It is impossible to express the depth of the aggravation and my profound appreciation once again to be able to be reunited with my family and loved ones.”
Mr. Ghosn defended his decision to flee Japan rather than face trial.
“I did not escape justice. I fled injustice and political persecution,” he said. “I was left with no other choice but to protect myself and my family.”
Mr. Ghosn also assailed his treatment by prosecutors.
Japanese officials said Mr. Ghosn’s claims were false. Prosecutors in Tokyo issued a long statement on Wednesday saying that Mr. Ghosn’s claim of a conspiracy between them and Nissan is “categorically false and completely contrary to fact.”
The statement said Mr. Ghosn’s treatment reflected the fact that he was a flight risk.
Earlier in the day, the authorities entered the offices of Mr. Ghosn’s lawyers in Japan with a search warrant. But the law firm of Junichiro Hironaka, Mr. Ghosn’s top lawyer in Japan, said lawyers had kept the authorities from confiscating two computers that Mr. Ghosn had used.
A crush of reporters packed the news conference. Mr. Ghosn walked with his wife, Carole, into a frenzy of camera operators in a plain white conference room in Beirut, with a burst of flash bulbs going off. Organizers were pleading with the camera operators to back off. A burly, bearded bodyguard stood next to Mr. Ghosn at the lectern.
Before he emerged, more than 100 journalists from across the world had jostled to get inside the conference room at the Lebanese Press Syndicate. A security team checked IDs and bags, and Lebanese reporters interviewed their Japanese counterparts about Mr. Ghosn’s escape from Tokyo.
Image
Mr. Ghosn arriving at the news conference on Wednesday in Beirut.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
How did Mr. Ghosn escape from Japan? Mr. Ghosn, 65,
a celebrity in Japan and
a hero to many in Lebanon, oversaw
a turnaround at Nissan starting in the late 1990s and had the rare position of
running two major companies simultaneously: Nissan and Renault, based in France.
Born in Brazil and raised in Lebanon, Mr. Ghosnjoined Renault as an executive in the 1990s.
But his career collapsed in late 2018 when he was arrested by the Japanese authorities and later charged with underreporting his compensation and shifting personal financial losses to Nissan. Nissan had also been indicted on charges of improperly reporting Mr. Ghosn’s income — and had said it would cooperate with prosecutors.
Carlos Ghosn, Mum on Tokyo Escape, Unleashes a Rambling Defense 
