TOKYO — The authorities knocked on Carlos Ghosn’s door just before 6 a.m. He and his wife, Carole Ghosn, were still in their pajamas.
Within minutes, more than a dozen people swarmed into their Tokyo apartment. They took Mrs. Ghosn’s phones, her passport, her diary and the letters she had written to her husband while he was in jail. A woman from the prosecutors’ office followed Mrs. Ghosn into the bathroom. When she stepped out of the shower, the woman handed her a towel.
They also handed Mrs. Ghosn papers and told her to sign them, she said. The papers were in Japanese, a language she can’t read.
“They didn’t push me around, but they wanted to humiliate me and my husband,” Mrs. Ghosn said in an interview on Thursday, hours after her husband, once of the auto industry’s most powerful leaders, was arrested for the fourth time.
“I was treated like a terrorist,” she said, “like I had a bomb on me.”
With that fourth, predawn arrest, the Japanese authorities have turned up the pressure against Mr. Ghosn, once one of the global auto industry’s most powerful executives.
Prosecutors on Thursday arrested Mr. Ghosn on suspicion of using his position at the top of Nissan of Japan to enrich himself, at a cost of $5 million to the company. With that, they are painting a broad picture of corporate greed more direct than their earlier charges against him, which included failing to disclose his full compensation and temporarily shifting his personal losses onto the company’s books.
Mr. Ghosn’s treatment at the hands of the Japanese authorities has provoked widespread criticism of the broad prosecutorial powers that underlie the famously polite facade of the country’s justice system. But Thursday’s tactics show prosecutors are uncowed: They arrested Mr. Ghosn while he was out on bail on previous charges, an unusual move even in Japan.
The early morning arrest also came just one day after Mr. Ghosn announced on Twitter that he was planning to hold a news conference next week to tell his side of the story. Now, he is unlikely to have that chance. Depending on court rulings, he could spend up to 20 days in jail.
The confiscation of Mrs. Ghosn’s cellphone and passport were also aggressive moves, Japanese legal experts said. Mrs. Ghosn, a dual citizen of Lebanon and the United States, has not been accused of a crime.
Mr. Ghosn’s lawyer, Junichiro Hironaka, said on Thursday that the latest arrest was “a very grave act.”
“This is hostage justice,” he said.
Mr. Hironaka said he would appeal any detention request by the prosecutors, who can ask a court to hold Mr. Ghosn for 10 days and then another 10 days, pending extension.
Prosecutors defended their actions. Shin Kukimoto, deputy chief prosecutor at the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, said at a news conference on Thursday that prosecutors had judged that Mr. Ghosn could tamper with evidence and had become a flight risk as a result of the new charges.
Even in Japan, where prosecutors have broad authority to detain and question suspects without a lawyer present, the arrest of Mr. Ghosn while he was out on bail surprised legal experts. To grant Mr. Ghosn bail, a court would have already deemed him to be an unlikely flight risk, said Stephen Givens, an American corporate lawyer in Tokyo. That, combined with confiscating Mrs. Ghosn’s cellphone and passport, constituted “a real abuse,” he said.
The accusations against Mr. Ghosn have shaken the automotive world and raised questions about the future of Nissan’s alliance with Renault of France. Both companies are now closely examining Mr. Ghosn’s conduct while at the helm of the alliance, with Renault saying it also sent evidence of possible misconduct to French prosecutors.
[Behind the scenes, Nissan seethed with internal tensions and worries about getting absorbed by Renault.]
Prosecutors on Thursday said they arrested Mr. Ghosn on suspicion of using a Nissan subsidiary to send payments to a company business partner who then sent money to a third company Mr. Ghosn controlled. Prosecutors didn’t disclose the name of the business partner. Nissan’s internal investigation has found that Mr. Ghosn authorized over $30 million in payments over seven years to a business partner in Oman, according to a person familiar with the report, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the findings are not public.
Mr. Ghosn’s legal team has defended the payments as legitimate disbursements. Nobuo Gohara, a former Japanese prosecutor turned defense lawyer, said the unusually forceful approach the authorities took against Mr. Ghosn on Thursday could signal doubt on the part of the authorities.
“The prosecutors have a real sense they’re in danger,” said Mr. Gohara, who is not a member of Mr. Ghosn’s defense team. “If things continue this way, there’s a possibility that they’ll lose at court. So, they’re doing things without regard to how they look.”
Mrs. Ghosn, 52, has largely been on the periphery of the her husband’s case. Her name previously appeared in relation to a wedding party at Versailles that was at the center of an internal investigation by Renault. The company has said that it turned over information to French prosecutors regarding the celebration and whether Mr. Ghosn had inappropriately spent company funds on it. He has denied the allegations, but offered to reimburse the money.
In her interview, Mrs. Ghosn described a wide and thorough search of their Tokyo home. “They checked every paper,” she said.
“I have a business card from my hairdresser,” she added. “They took it. My Bloomingdale’s card. They took pictures of all my credit cards. I was treated like a criminal.”
Mrs. Ghosn said the authorities demanded that she and her husband turn off a camera that was installed in their home as a condition of Mr. Ghosn’s bail. Eventually, the men put a piece of paper over the lens so it could not record the search, she said.
When the paperwork was presented to her, she added, she said she needed it translated and asked to speak with a lawyer.
“I said, ‘You have no right,’ and they said, ‘This is Japan.’”
Mr. Ghosn was taken to jail about an hour after the authorities arrived, according to a spokesman for the Ghosn family.
“He wanted to take a book, but they said, ‘No books, you’re not allowed to have a book,’” Mrs. Ghosn said.
“He wanted to take a piece of chocolate with him,” she added, “and they didn’t let him.”
Mrs. Ghosn said that, while they did not expect an early morning arrest, they thought another might be a possibility. Mr. Ghosn has recorded a statement summarizing what he planned to say at the April 11 news conference, according to Mrs. Ghosn and Mr. Ghosn’s lawyers. It is not clear when that recording might be released.
His earlier stint in jail was difficult for the auto executive, Mrs. Ghosn said. She said he had been too weak upon his release to hold a news conference.
“He lost 10 kilos,” Mrs. Ghosn said. “He was weak. I would be sitting with him from time to time, and he’d just fall asleep while we were talking.”
In the weeks since his bail, Mr. Ghosn had been spending his days at his lawyer’s office per court order and his evenings at home, Mrs. Ghosn said.
Mr. Ghosn is “devastated,” she said. “He’s scared. He’s worried about me,” she said through tears.
Still, she said, “he went out with his head up high.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/business/carlos-ghosn-carole-wife-japan-nissan-arrest.html
2019-04-04 11:48:54Z
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