Inside Carlos Ghosn’s Unbelievable, Daring Escape

the ouster chairman of Nissan has fled Japan where he was awaiting trial for financial crimes carlos dong has fled house arrest in tokyo i want to turn to Carlos Goins Great Escape how on earth did Carlos go to make his escape without a passport and while he was under house arrest how could someone under such heavy surveillance possibly escape from trial in a sophisticated high-tech country like Japan and yet it was possible because that's exactly what occurred I'm Matthew Campbell I'm a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek based in Singapore and I wrote the Tokyo job a story about Carlos Khan's daring escape from Tokyo Carlos Cohen has been one of the big names in the auto industry for the better part of 20 years he was a kind of legendary turnaround artist dispatched to Nissan by Renault he is Lebanese by descent however he was born in Brazil and moved to Lebanon with his parents of a child grew up largely in Lebanon but then went to France to continue his education and from there he was sort of launched into the corporate world working at Michelin how the tire company and then eventually at Renault when Gaughan was sent to Nissan in 1999 it it looked like a suicide mission this was a company that just could not be in worse shape but nobody wanted its cars it had a incredibly complicated management structure it was producing too many models huge amounts of debt he started simplifying everything he cut costs everywhere he could and sure enough Nissan returned to profit it returned to health it started growing again and he eventually turned it into the core of this global Empire the the renault-nissan Alliance that then came to incorporate other car makers in Russia and Mitsubishi in Japan and to be one of the two or three dominant automotive groups in the world this year is gonna be another record year for the industry so I came on to this story after this shocking series of events that took place in November 2018 when gone was suddenly arrested in Tokyo on the on the tarmac just about at Haneda Airport where he just arrived on his corporate jet welcome back breaking news in the past few minutes Nissan has revealed that its chairman has been arrested after allegations of serious misconduct Goins arrest initially was on on a somewhat peculiar charge what he was accused of was making false statements in financial disclosures to leave out compensation that he was going to receive he has said that this compensation that prosecutors say was not disclosed was in fact hypothetical it was never finalized and indeed he never received any of the money which is not in dispute but then over time there were three more charges another to do with compensation and then two more that alleged he had misused Nissan's resources in in dealings in the Middle East and in ways that lined his own pocket or got em out of financial jams on these third and fourth charges ago and of course denies wrongdoing says he acted properly and that the prosecutors are just making up allegations out of thin air you know this is such a lie from the beginning to the end now so that was the legal backdrop the corporate backdrop though was that there were real tensions at Nissan between gone and some of the other executives particularly Japanese executives who were concerned that a plan he was working on to more closely integrate Nissan and Renault under one corporate umbrella might diminish Nissan's independence might make it an arm of a French company and and that was the backdrop in which Nissan actually began actively investigating him in the spring of 2018 without guns knowledge of course and eventually passing its findings on to prosecutors and those findings then became the basis of the criminal charges against him and then he stayed in jail I believe the figure was 108 days in solitary confinement before he was finally given bail before trial and released he was out for a little while a little under a month I believe and he ends up back in jail for a little while he was then released again on bail but under very strict supervision not allowed to leave Japan of course tailed at all times by plainclothes agents he was not allowed to use the internet except under supervision at his lawyer's office he had been fired and cut off from his family so gone was was in a strange sort of limbo for a guy who had been on top of the world for so long it must have been incredibly Jarre there's no question it is very very difficult to defend yourself in a Japanese court he was looking at very long odds to clear his name and to stay out of prison the maximum he was looking at would have been 15 years to one and a half times the longest penalty is the rule but this is a guy who's in his sixties was looking at a potentially a very very long time behind bars and and well into his old age [Music] hello I spoke to a security contractor in Asia who had gotten a mysterious call sometime last year asking if he knew anyone who would be available to ask or to VIP out of the country in Japan he wanted to know what they were getting into but the person on the other end of the line didn't want to tell him anything or didn't know and so they kind of dropped it and the contractor I spoke to never really thought about this again until of course like the rest of the world he he saw the news that Carlos gone and somehow gotten out of Japan yeah boy what a twist this is right at the end of the year the last day of 2019 and Carlos going pulls this escape act and my initial reaction was just shock and disbelief it seemed so cinematic it was it was something from fiction that he could possibly have done this of course he did [Music] there was a team of ex military and ex police operatives who were working on these scenarios trying things out investigating airports and other ports of entry and eggs and in Japan looking for vulnerabilities looking for a way to do this they mustn't be seen talking together go back to church into the woods into the woods you understand the person who ran this team who was in charge was named Michael Taylor he is an American he was born in Staten Island joined the army out of high school and ended up in the Green Berets so he was a very elite soldier notably he was deployed to Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war and that began a pretty long association with Lebanon and particularly with the Christian community and Lebanon which is of course the community that gowned himself as a member of if you were looking for someone with the profile pull off a job like this he was the right kind of guy you had to get a very recognizable person out of the center of one of the biggest cities in the world somehow to an airport somehow onto an airplane all without being caught and the team who were helping gone noticed something intriguing that when he entered a hotel the people who were tailing him would drop away or wait when he entered a hotel why we don't know so that was something that they thought they could exploit now when the time came gone simply walked out the front door of his house [Music] he was wearing a surgical mask the kind you wear for germs or pollution he then went to a big hotel the Grand Hyatt and Roppongi which has quite a few entrances and exits it's quite a confusing place and from there he made his way to Shinagawa station one of the main rail hubs for Tokyo and a very busy place where you could easily just blend into the crowd after that he was on a speed train to Osaka Japan's second city even if he had been seen that wouldn't in itself have been a huge problem gone was permitted to travel within Japan and from there he went to Kansai Airport the main International Airport for Osaka so gonna piers to have been loaded onto this plane in Osaka in a big box the kind if you've ever seen Rodan setting up for a big concert that is how he was concealed that's how the people escorting him were able to evade an x-ray at a Kansai Airport because the box was far too big for the scanners the plane flew about 12 hours to Istanbul atatürk Airport where they were matched by an employee of the company they had chartered the plane from this employee then helped transfer going from this first plane which had arrived from Osaka to a second plane nearby which would take him on to Beirut Cohen got on that plane shortly after and and later that morning he was safely in Beirut now I'm going to be able to speak with facts and data and evidence and hopefully you will discover the truth goons position really from the beginning was that he was the victim of a coup that there were nationalist factions at Nissan within the Japanese government who wanted him gone who objected to his plans to integrate Nissan and Renault under a single holding company and who had decided that to get rid of him they needed to for lack of a better term find some dirt fine something that they could use to dislodge him the whole thing was applauded Japan has issued what's called a red notice in gongs name and that's a sort of wanted poster that goes out through Interpol the global federation of police agencies however lebanon as a policy does not extradite its citizens so the the outcome of this process is pretty much preordained he's not going to be extradited from Lebanon what could of course occur would be a trial in Lebanon that the Japanese allegations would be tried in Lebanon Gaughan has said he's happy to face trial anywhere where he believes such a trial would be fair that obviously in his view excludes Japan the difference between gone and other criminal defendants whether Japan or elsewhere is frankly money this is a guy who had very significant financial resources who had connections all over the world he was drawing multiple salaries and he had multiple jobs he was the chairman of Nissan he was the chairman and CEO of Renault he was also the chairman of Mitsubishi which was the third major arm of their Global Alliance but gone you know making 10 15 million dollars a year was by far the highest paid person in Japan you know country where even top business executives tend to be paid relatively modestly it did rankle some people for sure [Music] gone is in Lebanon with his family he is in a country where he's comfortable where he knows lots of people and could spend as much time as he wants probably living a quiet life there but I don't think that's what going wants I think he he craves an indication he wants to have a comeback and so while he's kind of gone quiet in the last little while I don't think we've heard the last of him at all you

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 863,238

Rating: 4.8818188 out of 5

Keywords: News, bloomberg, carlos ghosn, nissan, japan, tokyo, escape, businessweek, storylines

Id: vQ0Ch0-s5Wo

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020