Don't shout at me. So can please tell me? I'm not going to. Please wait. You know, I've covered a lot of companies. I've covered a lot of
Machiavellian companies where, you know, people play rough. I don't think I've ever seen anything on the scale of Nissan. - He is making you, but you act for Nissan. I mean, it's corrupt. One of the most dramatic elements was Ravinder Passi's home being raided by court officials in Yokohama. - You scared my wife,
you scared my children. I worked at Nissan for 16 years. So Rav Passi's journey
into the darkest recesses of the Japanese corporate world started when he was the general counsel, the highest corporate lawyer
position in the company. - [Reporter] In the past few minutes,
Nissan has revealed that its chairman has been arrested after allegations of serious misconduct. He was tasked with
investigating Carlos Ghosn. And he was told, conduct
an internal investigation and get to the heart of the matter. And then along the way
he started to notice serious conflicts of interest. He is one of the few people who knows an extreme amount of detail regarding the alleged
crimes by Carlos Ghosn. And he's now ready to tell
his own story on the record about some of the events that happened. My name's Ravinder Passi. I'm the former global general counsel of Nissan Motor Co. Limited. And you could say yes,
I had a front row seat in terms of what was going on. - [Reporter] When Carlos Ghosn saved Nissan years ago he was depicted in Japanese
comic books as this hero. And now maybe we'll see comic
books where he's the villain. In corporate Japan, Nissan
was quite an unusual company. It was led for two decades
by a non-Japanese executive. Well, Carlos Ghosn was a hero in the Japanese business world. If you had a global business celebrity in Japan and worldwide, it
was definitely Carlos Ghosn. - [Reporter] In a country with few foreigners at the top, he stood out. But over the years he saved
Nissan from bankruptcy, allied with Renault and Mitsubishi, and turn the alliance into one of the most competitive in the world. Yet as the years went on, I think his ambitions
changed a little bit. He started thinking about legacy plays. And one of them was to
really tighten the alliance between Renault and Japan. And unbeknownst to him,
there was a contingent of senior Nissan executives that were really felt
threatened by that move. They really thought that they would lose complete control of the car company. And even in the government there was probably a little bit of anxiety about a national champion
in the auto industry falling under full-blown foreign control. - [Reporter] Carlos Ghosn was an auto industry leader respected by many in Japan. Now he's in jail. The arrest of Carlos Ghosn came completely out of the blue. This was in November of 2018. He was coming to Japan
on Nissan's corporate jet for a regular executive meeting. And he was met on the tarmac
by Japanese authorities who whisked him away to jail and charged him with
financial misconduct crimes. So what happened was that a power struggle ensued inside the company and somewhere along the
way it was criminalized. By that I mean that there were allegations leveled at Carlos Ghosn about the way he reported his pay to
Japanese authorities, the way he handled money
inside the company, that in other contexts
might've been a board action, might've been handled internally. A number of executives at Nissan decided to take this difference and take it over to the
Tokyo Prosecutor's Office. And that unleashed a chain of events that would shake the entire auto industry. So after Carlos Ghosn was arrested, Nissan launched an internal investigation into the events that led up to his arrest. So Rav Passi is tasked with
investigating Carlos Ghosn. And he was told, get to
the heart of the matter. Find out what Carlos Ghosn did wrong and bring it to our shareholders. Yeah, it's really complicated because you had various things
coming out of the weeds. 2018, investigation has started and we become aware of
matters in terms of conflicts, actions by certain individuals
that caused some concern because things might not
quite be what they seem. So in our story we
really took a close look at Hari Nada and his role
in Carlos Ghosn's downfall. Hari Nada is one of the most fascinating figures inside Nissan. He's also a lawyer. He's originally Malaysian. Hello, Mr. Hari. And he had a meteoric
rise through the company and became very, very close to Carlos Ghosn and other top figures. He had a front row seat at all the major strategic
deliberations at the company. And when he discovered that Carlos Ghosn, as his final legacy play, was going to tighten the relationship between Renault and Nissan, he made a decision to
go against Carlos Ghosn. And he became one of the key figures that decided that Carlos Ghosn had to go. Hari Nada was somebody who actually recruited me into the company. So I have a long-standing
relationship with him, or did have a long-standing
relationship with him, for many, many years he was a mentor. I had doubts about the credibility of the process right at the start. Hari Nada had a plea deal
with the Tokyo prosecutors. Now that suggests he was
intrinsically involved in some of the wrongdoing, or
the allegations of wrongdoing. And it just didn't smell
right, just doesn't sit right. So there was a basic conflict of interest. In other words, Hari Nada
had to deliver results to Japanese prosecutors to avoid
his own criminal liability, and he's accusing and leading the investigation of Carlos Ghosn. Some of the people who had been involved in the original alleged crimes were also looking into
the affairs themselves. Ravinder Passi began pointing out some of these conflict of interest issues. And the reason for that is essentially his concern was for the company. If the company's own
investigation into itself was compromised, that could lead to a very weak position
in various lawsuits that it was dealing with across the world. I had discussions with Hari, discussions with the statutory auditors about these conflicts, discussions with HR about some of these conflicts, because at that point
we reported into him. You know at the time everything was quite, as you can imagine, it
was, we've got to do this, we've got to do that,
we've got to move fast. But when you step back and
look at some of these things you just think, "Oh my God,
what was going on here?" Because me, members of my team were being placed in immediate danger. Your chairman's been arrested, a representative director's been arrested. They both happened to be foreigners. And then now what we need to do, we're being instructed to do, is certain compliance professionals need to go into properties in Brazil, for example, and retrieve evidence. They've got to do it very carefully, because if they don't do it carefully they're going to get convicted
of criminal activities. And likewise, when a team of lawyers were commissioned to go to Lebanon, I mean, one of my immediate concerns was, why are lawyers from Nissan being sent to go to Lebanon to retrieve evidence? These are just lawyers, they're corporate lawyers from Nissan. You had revelations that
a number of executives had benefited from share
appreciation rights when they shouldn't have. I mean, you know,
substantive amounts of money being taken by these guys when they weren't entitled to take them. And you do think, yes, how is
this going to look later on? It's going to look quite concerning. So that triggered for me the
sort of assessment that well, I'm going to have to do something. Because up until this point
I haven't put down on paper these conflicts and these issues. So Rav Passi makes a fateful move. He writes this letter to the board listing every suspicion
he has in great detail, backed up by evidence, backed up by memos, of why this internal investigation
had serious problems. He sends the letter to the
board, and it's crickets. He doesn't hear much of anything. Nothing happened
thereafter, nothing at all. Just like it just gone into a black box. And he began to suspect
that there was a desire even at the highest level within Nissan to kind of sweep these conflicts
of interest under the rug. Unfortunately for me, I
think, again with hindsight, people must've thought
that this is the nail that's sticking out
and we can't have this. Within three days of me submitting that to the board of directors, that letter to the independent
board of directors, I was removed from the Ghosn
executive conduct matters. I was then told that I could not attend board meetings anymore. And up until that point I had attended every single board meeting. I was then also told
that after eight years of being in Japan, I'd
be going back to the U.----K. It eventually transpired that I'd be the VP of projects and transformation, managing a team of three. So you can imagine what this
feels like at this stage, almost an arbitrary removal from Japan where I've lived for eight
years, had three children there, my family has grown up, and
we've been settled there, having a few months earlier been promoted to vice president at the global level to being almost demoted. So Passi was essentially being reassigned to get him as far away from the internal
investigation as possible, and also to a certain
extent in retaliation to some of the issues that
he brought up regarding the internal investigation and Hari Nada. What happened to Rav Passi can be seen as a series of corporate humiliations. I mean, first of all, his
immediate responsibilities were taken away from him. Eventually he'd lost the
coveted general counsel title. But it didn't stop there. Toward the end of his stay in Japan, Rav and his wife were convinced that they were being followed. During that period I'd noticed
that whilst driving my car I'd have other cars following me. First time I noticed this
was at around mid-March, and I was driving, I can't
remember where I was going, but this gray van, small van just literally started following me. And I noticed that there was somebody in the car taking pictures. And lo and behold, we were
absolutely being followed either by people on foot
or other individuals, two or three, normally
two, burly men in a car, different cars at different
times, following us around. They were following the family as well. And, you know, given we'd seen, or I'd seen the Nissan security department behave in a very, very
egregious manner with others in terms of following and surveilling, I was very concerned as
to what they were doing and who they were giving
this information to. Because if they're giving this information to the authorities, you do think, why? What's going on here? I mean, this is just not normal behavior. And this all culminated in a rather dramatic event
in the middle of 2020. Who are you people? Where Nissan had hired a legal team and had obtained an unusual court order from the district court in Yokohama. To basically do a search of his home and seizure of his, you know,
corporate laptop and phone, and other document. - If you don't let us in now, we have to break this key. So it was a pretty extreme
way to treat someone who had spent 16 years at the company. There's someone else at our door. These people have all come in. We don't really know who they are apart from the fact that
I've been shown a badge that says the Yokohama Court, and they're here to recover a
laptop and the mobile phone. It was even more weird because I'd highlighted to the directors that certain Nissan executives
were trying to recover this laptop and this phone
whilst I was still in Japan. And I was very concerned
because it had evidence on there that related to misconduct matters and other forms of inappropriate conduct. It was just an another
form of intimidation, another form of harassment forcing me almost to leave
the company and the country. Because once they'd retained
and obtained these items, we were still followed. Which again, I just couldn't understand. What is the point of doing that? You know, this is a car company. This is not the KGB. I think it's fair to say that Rav Passi didn't have full battlefield awareness of all the intrigue going on at Nissan. I mean, Hari Nada is interesting because he's both
charismatic and charming, and one of the most brutal
corporate in-fighters one could ever run across. This a confidential company email, right? You should not have this. If he had fallen into line, he would probably still
have his job at Nissan, be paid very well, and continued his work. A career that he spent 16
years building at Nissan is irretrievably broken. It's been smashed to smithereens. He and his family paid
a huge price, certainly. But in terms of being
able to sleep at night, I think he's come out ahead. I highlighted issues to the
highest levels of the company so that they could be
dealt with appropriately by those in charge. There was no response to those. And there was retaliation against me. What's really profound,
absolutely profound, is that none of your colleagues, I mean, people you have known
for years, forget it. Yeah.
You're on your own. Yeah. And yeah, you gotta be ready for that. You've gotta be ready for that. If you take it on anyway.
I don't know what he was actually accused of, but knowing how they treat the accused in Japan, I am 100% with him on fleeing the country. He was never going to get a fair trial.
Although I do believe that Ghosn was never going to get a fair trail (99% prosecution rate in jpn), I have a feeling that he along with all the other executive board members were dipping in the cookie jar.
The poor guy got screwed in the power struggle! that too for doing the job which is the sad part.
This Ghosn case has more drama and twists than even a multi-million feature film. The fact that Nissan's top corporate is in cahoots and ousting their general counsel is damning.
Yet another "investigation" entertainment bring to your by bloomberg.
The story is not as simple as what bloomberg attempt to portrait, perhaps it is mean t simplified for typical USA audience.
Nissan is a conglomerate like many Japanese Keiretsu (AKA zaibatsu). Keiretsu is a complicated holding chains that are no less complicated than those rich "old money" families dynasty. Any attempt to "streamline" such huge conglomerate is a taboo, as the complexity is way beyond a person like Carlos ghosn that only know how to run a car company.
Renault is yet another complicated conglomerate : it owns by French government, which will against merger.
The final nail in the coffin does not come from Nissan, but Mitsubishi. If Mitsubishi is a 600 pounds gorilla, then Nissan is a 5 pounds chicken. Carlos ghosn simply think he is too smart to bring in Mitsubishi. And all this attempt has irked the French government, Japan government and also the Mitsubishi conglomerate.
Bear in mind that, Carlos ghosn is not the first CEO that get arrested due to "national interest". In 2013, FBI arrested Alstom executive Frédéric Pierucci base on some bribery case in Indonesia, and "coincidentally", in 2014, General Electric bid to take Alstom.
So how did Carlos ghosn "escape" ? It is another common sense : Carlos is a trouble for Japan foreign affairs, nothing beat Carlos ghosn plan his own "escape".