Carlos Ghosn Flees to Lebanon to Escape Japan Legal System

1. Ghosn was a talented CEO who engineered big turnarounds at Renault and Nissan, who also was likely embezzling from the company.

2. The Japanese justice system is fundamentally tilted toward the prosecution, and is especially unfair to powerful foreign individuals.

Personally, I hope this to be a good show to Japanese people. The timing is good too. It is finally dawning on people in Japan that their government might not be entirely fair, and how the extreme rich like him can do shady dealings. Many of them have been too naive.

Though all countries look askance at "them furniners" eg The HP / Autonomy Trial.

That being said, nobody does anything about it in the USA for various reasons, and I’ll accept that the USA is certainly one of the easier places in the world to get away with egregious greed.

Yeah! That's why Martin Shkrelli was so admired as a national hero in the U.S.

...right?

I can't think of a single place on this planet where greed is admired, unless you want to over-generalize and lump in general capitalism and entrepreneurship -- but I think that the effort to over-define greed into any and all wealth accumulation is missing the actual point behind the concept of greed itself.

Americans don’t view greed positively, we are too busy trying to survive a rigged system without falling victim to some financially crippling life event.

https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america

(Hat tip to peteretep for the updated figure).

The Supreme Court only allows the exclusion of incriminating evidence only when it yields “appreciable deterrence”. In practice, this means that if police obtained a valid warrant (at the time), then the evidence is still admissible even if the warrant was later found to be illegal.

Case: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/564/229/

That is, people tend to side with what feels right In a given situation rather than what is the best policy for a government to execute over millions of people over centuries.

Not sure what crime you think the CEO of Lehman Bros. committed (is not having enough pull with the Fed and US gov to get a bailout like the other large banks a crime?)

As for the "many others", Martha Stewart went to jail for five months. Bernie Madoff got a 150 year sentence and is still in jail. Timothy Rigas (Adelphia Communications) served over 10 years in prison. Etc, etc.

If Carlos would were in the US, his assets would have been frozen and not permitted to flee.

GFI (controlled by Ghosn) paid SBA (an Omani businessman, Suhail Bahwan) for "marketing incentives." At some point later, SBA paid GFI. The Japanese suggest this was a kickback scheme but 1) the fact that one firm paid another and vice versa is not ipso facto evidence of financial wrongdoing 2) if this really is a kickback scheme, why such low sums of money relative to his net worth?

The other accusation in the articles you reference is that GFI made payments to a company named "Shogun Investments", of which Ghosn's son was involved, and that he directed those funds to his own financial startup, "Shogun Enterprises", which then possibly used the funds to buy a yacht.

The first charge has no clear basis for impropriety, and the second is against Ghosn's son, not Ghosn (and btw, even if Ghosn's son did misuse investor funds -- and he denies doing so -- it wouldn't be the first startup in the world to do so).

Unless you can explain to me something I'm missing these accusations do not strike me as "the elephant in the room."

But that's completely orthogonal as to whether Ghosn is guilty of anything. You don't get a free pass for fraud (embezzlement in this case) just because the context is political. I'm surprised that a lot of people are mixing these two things together. There is what Ghosn did, or is accused of doing (embezzlement), and there is why anyone went in to check (prevent the Renault Nissan merger).

The US government is also well known to use its judicial branch to exert political pressure on foreign actors (see the Alstom buyout by GE). That doesn't make the fraud perpetrated by individuals somehow acceptable. But it can justify governments getting involved to prevent these individual actions having larger consequences.

Look at the Takata airbag executives. Their decisions resulted in the actual deaths of human beings and they were not treated as harshly.

Yeah, never happens, just like you almost never see any big profile politician beyond bars in Japan. And Japanese CEOs are pretty much affiliated to politicians, so there you have it.

By the way it is astonishing how much the press in Japan is painting Gohn as a culprit on an ongoing basis despite any actual trial and all. The media is completely sold to power here.

Source?

Regardless of what happens though, this will have a chilling effect on Japanese companies' ability to recruit foreign talent at top levels -- but it would have been far worse if Mr. Ghosn had been convicted and imprisoned.

Moving internationally with fraudulent credentials would land most people in jail, but it seems the local government "loves" the man (no doubt his money helps with political favours), so he's safe from that too.