Ghosn resigned and fled to Lebanon in 2019 due to his pending arrest in Japan on charges of financial misconduct
He had been the CEO of Nissan since 2001 and of the Renault-Nissan Alliance since 2005
In his new book, he accuses Nissan of having gone back to being a “boring” and “mediocre” company, like it was before he became its CEO.
Few automotive CEO’s have made headlines more often than Carlos Ghosn did since 2019.
The man in Charge of the Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance became a wanted international fugitive in late 2019 when he hid in a box to fly to Lebanon in order to avoid his pending arrest in Japan over charges of financial misconduct.
Since then, he did multiple interviews with medias from around the world in which he claims his innocence while accusing Nissan and the Japanese government of having orchestrated his demise.
Ghosn had been an executive at Renault for a few years when the French automaker bought a 36.8% stake in Nissan in 1999, at which point he became the Japanese automaker’s COO.
He then progressed in the ranks of both companies until he became the CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance in 2005.
His politics helped bring Nissan out of the financial troubles it was in at the turn of the millennium, but the reversed power dynamic in which Renault has control over Nissan, even though the Japanese company is worth about twice as much as the French one, as well as attempts to gain power over the alliance made by the French government have led to a rocky relationship between Ghosn and the Japanese executives of Nissan.
Then, late in 2018, allegations of financial misconducts, including having underreported his salary and used company assets for his personal interest, led to his arrest in Japan.
Ghosn then took advantage of his bail to flee the country in order to avoid trial.
In a recent interview on Fox, he talked about his new book, in which he gives his side of the story regarding the events of the last few years.
He also took the opportunity to say that Nissan has gone back twenty years and returned to being a “boring” and “mediocre” company, like it was before he took the helm, going as far as to say the company will go bankrupt in a few years.
These remarks seem to be quite hypocritical, since pretty much every new product introduced by Nissan in the last two years were developed under his own leadership.
