
Nissan Chairman Ghosn arrested in Japan over financial law violation - ilamont
https://japantoday.com/category/crime/Nissan-Chairman-Ghosn-arrested-over-financial-law-violation
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forapurpose
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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/business/nissan-carlos-ghosn-
misconduct.html)

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bantunes
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.

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WorldMaker
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.)

~~~
giobox
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...

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ezoe
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.

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mywittyname
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.

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Kankuro
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)

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docbrown
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...](https://newsroom.nissan-
global.com/releases/release-860852d7040eed420ffbaebb223b6973-181119-01-e)

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mtw
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

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wpietri
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...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-
trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html)

