Nissan Chairman Ghosn arrested in Japan over financial law violation | Hacker News Reader

Nissan Chairman Ghosn arrested in Japan over financial law violation

japantoday.com

54 pointsilamont19 comments

Compare to UK and American corporations:

* The corporation investigated its own chairman (and CEO of its larger alliance), based on a whistleblower's report.

* A corporate chairman/CEO was arrested by the government, and the accusation is not massive fraud but under-reporting his own compensation and making personal use of corporate assets.

* A chair/CEO of a global corporation wanted $8.5 million in salary, and that was considered too much (this was a response from European stakeholders too). He took less.

Perhaps some people with experience in Japanese business can provide context for what we are seeing.

EDIT: Corrected Ghosn's title

EDIT2: Corrected the allegations by the government. I had been reading the NY Times article, not the one linked above.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/business/nissan-carlos-gh...

Don't wank too much on Japan, they have Yakuza who are actually doing the turn that the Corleone family was trying to make towards hedge funds, without doing the jail time is normally required in between the two activities. Nothing is perfect.

Japan is also the country where there's 99% conviction rate in the courts (imagine what that entails) and you can be held by the police without charges for 30 days.

What little I know about Japanese law is from English translations of the Ace Attorney series, but one of the clear things from those (silly) games is that Japan seems to have a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in courts.

(This seems somewhat mitigated by prosecutors supposedly not even bringing innocent people forward to trial at all, but in the Ace Attorney series the number of cheating prosecutors doesn't seem to make it a very trustworthy system. Then again, given there wouldn't be trials for the games' defendant protagonists to solve if that weren't the case, it may be anecdotally skewed for the benefits of gameplay. Given how much psychic powers factor into the series, I try to make no assumptions.)

I know absolutely nothing about the Japanese legal system, but I suspect using the Ace Attorney series of video games to try and draw meaningful conclusions is probably not the wisest idea...

>* A chair/CEO of a global corporation wanted $8.5 million in salary, and that was considered too much (this was a response from European stakeholders too). He took less.

You know, in Japan C-Levels don't get salaries anywhere that high. CEO of Mitsui (that Mitsui,) only earns around $1m

Something smells very fishy on this. I bet all the information on this news so far comes from the intentional leak from police and Nissan.

It's rather odd to be arrested for a tax evasion alone. If it's just a tax evasion, you got a letter from tax office and pay tax and fine. So I think it's 別件逮捕, as usual.

I think there was internal political coup in Nissan.

> It's rather odd to be arrested for a tax evasion alone. If it's just a tax evasion, you got a letter from tax office and pay tax and fine.

Are you talking about what happens in Japan, or what happens where you live (if that's not Japan)?

> tax evasion

Per the article, the charge was under-reporting his compensation; taxes aren't mentioned in the article. The reporting could be a corporate requirement independent of taxes, as one alternative example. Was he arrested for failing fiduciary duties as a corporate officer? Lying on a corporate report? Corporate tax evasion? Personal tax evasion? The article doesn't seem to say.

EDIT: I was reading the NY Times article. The article linked above also doesn't mention taxes, and says it's a violation of what seem to be corporate reporting laws:

[Ghosn] had for many years understated his income in reports submitted to the Tokyo Stock Exchange and had conducted other "significant acts of misconduct" including misusing company funds for personal purposes.

Tokyo prosecutors believe Ghosn's underreporting of his remuneration constitutes a violation of the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act.

All the Japanese news sources I could get yesterday only mentioned the arrest for the tax evasion.

Google translate says "別件逮捕" is "another arrest" but I suspect something is being lost in the translation. Could you explain this term a little more for anyone else not familiar with it?

It means arresting a suspect on a minor misdemeanor which satisfies warrant requirements to make the suspect available for interrogation for "another", bigger crime.

It makes me wonder if Ghosn was preparing some sort takeover similar to what Porsche did to VW in the 2000s, and the Japanese government isn't interested in having one of their largest auto makers owned by a European company.

The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance has existed in one form or another since 1999, so it would be weird for the Japanese government to worry about it now. Though Ghosn has served as the Alliance Chairman and CEO, so I suppose it is possible for a Ghosn shakedown to be an attempt to shakedown the Alliance. Seems an odd way to go about it though.

Things I did not know, from France Info radio: - before the alliance, Renault and Nissan had about the same size. Now Nissan is twice as big in number of cars. - Nissan maybe in position to merge with/control Renault (and French government is not really pleased)

Hiding $50m over the years isn't worth arresting?

Boards werent aware.

Here is Nissan’s full press release regarding Ghosn in which they implicate Greg Kelly, Representative Director, as also being involved in this scheme.

One thing is for certain: they’re hanging Ghosn out to dry.

>Nissan has been providing information to the Japanese Public Prosecutors Office and has been fully cooperating with their investigation. We will continue to do so.

[0] https://newsroom.nissan-global.com/releases/release-860852d7...

It's a shame - he was a celebrity in Japan, turned around Nissan and Renault's fortunes, and could have retired as a living legend. Now even if this turns out to be false, his reputation will be in ruin. Why would you do tax evasion for small amounts when you already have dozens of millions in the bank

Unfortunately, the kind of person who will sacrifice to get dozens of millions in the bank is also often the kind of person who will be aggressive about running up the score.

We had a clear recent example. A family that's already rich, but did all sorts of dubious and/or illegal things to further their wealth: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/d...

Being the "legend" seems to have been the problem as no one but those two were aware of them hiding $50m and was also using company cash on private matters.

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