[lmm]

His prosecution was blatantly motivated (the CEO who replaced him has far bigger embezzleme^H^Hfinancial irregularities that no-one cares to charge him for). I doubt people would have been so eager to help him escape if he had actually broken the law rather than being charged for running a big company while foreign.

[mikeyouse]

He had enriched himself to the tune of tens of millions of company dollars completely undisclosed to the firm.. he had multiple mansions, yachts, and “CEO Reserve” bank accounts that the BoD wasn’t aware of. The men who were “so eager” to help him escape were paid upwards of $1M to do so… man I’m getting tired of people justifying ludicrous amounts of graft and theft.

If other people embezzle as well, send them to prison, but there’s no universe in which Ghosn is clean. And there are plenty of big companies ran by people who aren’t so morally bankrupt.

[gottorf]

> If other people embezzle as well, send them to prison, but there’s no universe in which Ghosn is clean.

Well, selective justice is a form of injustice. I only have superficial knowledge of the Ghosn saga, but if what the GP alleges is true, then it's not fair to Ghosn that he's prosecuted for something that others get a pass. Of course, I take your point that it's entirely possible to be a bigcorp CEO without fraud and self-dealing.

To scale it down, lots of people drive over the speed limit, which is against the law; but only some people get pulled over and ticketed for it. Many people also observe the speed limit. In the Ghosn analogy, suppose that Japanese drivers got a pass, but foreigners didn't.

Should everyone get pulled over the instant they exceed the speed limit? Do we want to live in such a world? Is it just a matter of scale, the difference between driving a car too fast vs. stealing millions of dollars from your employer?

[rtpg]

There are plenty of criciticisms about the means by which he was prosecuted but "others get a pass but he doesn't" is not a great way of thinking about this.

If the government decides to get more serious about this stuff, there will be firsts! There will be people who "got away with it"! It's never applied perfectly evenly. You gotta start somewhere.

Of course the way he was thrown around, when they could have impounded a bunch of his assets and just restricted his movements... the police have their ways of doing things and restriction of speech in particular to avoid coverups is probably a huge chunk of their motivations.

Ghosn isn't the first executive in Japan to ever be arrested. But maybe the police felt the stakes were too high. During the Livedoor scandal, Horie had to post a 300 million yen bond for his temporary freedom, and that was for an "internet company". How much would Ghosn's bond need to be in comparison? Not saying that this is the right way to go about things, but it feels at least consistent.

[lmm]

> If the government decides to get more serious about this stuff, there will be firsts! There will be people who "got away with it"! It's never applied perfectly evenly. You gotta start somewhere.

Sure. But if that "somewhere" just happens to be the literal 1 foreigner among literally hundreds of CEOs doing the same thing, there will naturally be raised eyebrows.

[mikeyouse]

> Should everyone get pulled over the instant they exceed the speed limit?

In places with speed cameras, that is exactly what happens. There’s no better way to find an unjust law than to enforce it evenly.

And scale is very important! In your analogy, many CEOs are speeding, some driving 5mph over, some 10mph, but Carlos was tripling the speed limit and then sawed through the bars of the courthouse before he saw trial. It’s insane to me that people are defending it. If you don’t want to be selectively prosecuted for massively embezzling company funds - don’t embezzle company funds..

He had secretly bought himself a 140ft yacht with stolen company funds!

https://img.20mn.fr/FofgQudYQhKtDOGwCHCuRyk/1444x920_un-cust...

[ty6853]

I don't care if he raped 12 nuns, he was unable to get a fair trial so his escape was just. Japan's justice system is a farcical.

[mikeyouse]

Protip - you should care if he raped 12 nuns! Japan's justice system, while certainly has issues is universally considered to be one of the worlds' fairest. Their high conviction rate is solely due to taking so few cases to judgement as most plead out.

[smcin]

Not so - Japan's [criminal] justice system is absolutely not "universally considered to be one of the worlds' fairest". Cite any authoritative source for claiming that. Most sources I found cite the Nordic countries or other W European countries.

(A high conviction rate at trial in Japan is merely due to not having a right-to-silence, imprisonment till trial, prosecutors discretionarily dropping some cases.)

[lmm]

> He had enriched himself to the tune of tens of millions of company dollars completely undisclosed to the firm.. he had multiple mansions, yachts, and “CEO Reserve” bank accounts that the BoD wasn’t aware of.

Really? Why did none of that come through in the court case then? I don't like the norm of giving CEOs valuable benefits instead of cash, but it's undeniably an accepted norm, especially in Japan.

He was convicted for the deferred pension compensation that he had not yet actually received, and for one year, despite the fact pattern being the same every year. The court blatantly made the minimum possible conviction because they knew none of the charges had merit but couldn't possibly acquit him.

[mikeyouse]

The SEC found that he had over $140M in undisclosed compensation, much of it hidden from Nissan’s management: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2019/comp246...

The French have multiple arrest warrants for him due to multiple overlapping fraud and embezzlement cases: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230704-second-french...

The BVI found that tens of millions of dollars stored there and the luxury yacht bought with Nissan’s funds and registered to a Shell company owned by Ghosn’s son, actually did belong to Nissan.. and on and on.

Why does anyone give that absolute creep the benefit of the doubt? It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!

[lmm]

> The SEC found that he had over $140M in undisclosed compensation, much of it hidden from Nissan’s management: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2019/comp246...

That looks to be one side's claims, and even this one-sided telling acknowledges that he never received any of that money, and that the CFO and finance department signed off on what happened.

> It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!

He fled the country after being detained and isolated (especially from his wife) for literally years without actually being charged or getting to trial. They were blatantly trying to break him without having to go to the trouble of actually proving a case. And the trial I'm talking about, that convicted him on exactly one count, was held in his absence after he escaped and had no reason to not throw everything at him.

If and when he's convicted in a fair trial under international norms where he gets a fair chance to defend himself, I'll condemn him for that. But until then I'm not going to take the allegations of the people who wanted him gone at face value.

[mikeyouse]

> Even this one-sided telling acknowledges that he never received any of that money, and that the CFO and finance department signed off on what happened.

It absolutely doesn't say that.. and it's not a credit to Carlos that many of his schemes to steal tens of millions of dollars in the future were discovered before he could do so.

> In addition to the more than $90 million in undisclosed and unpaid compensation, Ghosn and his subordinates knowingly or recklessly made, or caused to be made, false and misleading statements regarding more than $50 million of additional pension benefits for Ghosn. These included misleading Nissan’s CFO and other Nissan executives regarding the accounting for the additional pension amounts, and creating a false disclosure to support how Nissan accounted for them

[..]

> On or around February 23, 2015, at Ghosn’s direction, Nissan Employee 1 submitted an “Application for Budget Usage” signed by Ghosn, Nissan Employee 1, and Nissan’s CFO, to approve the use of the CEO reserve to book the LTIP awards. Nissan’s CFO was falsely told that the LTIP awards were a broad-based grant to numerous Nissan participants rather than that the vast majority was for Ghosn and included exchange rate protection on the inflated retirement allowance. Relying on this false information, Nissan’s CFO approved and signed off on the LTIP expense request, and the amounts were recorded over three fiscal years. Nissan’s CFO would not have approved booking the LTIP expense without additional disclosure if he had known the truth about its actual intended use.

The board approved Ghosn to create a subsidary to invest in new technologies and instead he spent over $20M on houses for himself in Rio and Beirut...

I literally can't believe people defend this level of corruption. He didn't spend "years" in jail awaiting trial, it was 3 months after the first arrest, another month after the second and then he fled the country within a year of his first arrest [the Japanese kept him in jail for those first 3 months because for some reason they thought he was a flight risk!)

[lmm]

> it's not a credit to Carlos that many of his schemes to steal tens of millions of dollars in the future were discovered before he could do so.

It's weird and misleading to describe money he never received and will never receive as "undisclosed compensation".

> Nissan’s CFO was falsely told that the LTIP awards were a broad-based grant to numerous Nissan participants rather than that the vast majority was for Ghosn and included exchange rate protection on the inflated retirement allowance. Relying on this false information, Nissan’s CFO approved and signed off on the LTIP expense request, and the amounts were recorded over three fiscal years. Nissan’s CFO would not have approved booking the LTIP expense without additional disclosure if he had known the truth about its actual intended use.

Right, that's the same part I was reading. The CFO is evidently claiming now that he was deceived back then, let's see what the evidence for that looks like.

From the fact that we have all these detailed figures and calculations, it looks to me very much like the CFO, board and finance department were in on the whole thing. This isn't him secretly taking money out of the vault, it's the company doing accounting tricks to pay him in a way that's more tax-efficient and then flipping it into saying he was stealing from them when they decide to get rid of him.

[BonoboIO]

As much as i think, that he would never have gotten a fair trial … he did not even pay his escape helpers.