After a dramatic escape from Japan, the auto titan is back in
the homeland he left as a teenager. He can't leave without risking
arrest and worries he is being watched. And for the first time in
decades, he has time on his hands.
By Nick Kostov and Sean McLain
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (February 22, 2020).
BEIRUT -- As dusk settled over the capital of Lebanon, Carlos
Ghosn took a seat in the back corner of a dimly lit restaurant a
short walk from his house. A waiter approached. In Arabic, Mr.
Ghosn ordered an espresso.
A bodyguard, after looking the place over, disappeared. Several
groups of Lebanese businessman talked quietly nearby, paying little
mind to the former auto titan who had made world-wide headlines
weeks earlier by escaping house arrest in Tokyo and fleeing Japan
after sneaking onto a private plane in a large black box.
Mr. Ghosn's new life in Lebanon, he said between sips of
espresso, is one of restrictions. He can't leave the country where
he was born without risking arrest, and Lebanon's banking crisis
has crimped his access to cash. At times, street protests have made
even moving around the city a challenge.
And always, he is on the lookout for Nissan or Japanese
authorities who might be shadowing him.
"I've been told I need to protect myself," he said. "Even the
building in front of my house, Japanese people came to rent it. I
don't know what their intentions are. People tell me that a lot of
Japanese people are coming, taking photos and observing."
His life of hopscotching around the world on a private jet, he
knows, is over. His primary focus these days is mounting his
counterattack against charges that as head of the auto-making
alliance between Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co., he
misappropriated company money and hid compensation. "We're talking
about fighting for my reputation, fighting for my legacy and
fighting for my rights," he said. "I've never been as motivated as
I am today."
Asked whether he has anything to apologize for in the wake of
his escape, his eyes narrowed. "Apology for what...?" he said. "For
who? Nissan? Renault?"
Mr. Ghosn's return to the homeland he left as a teenager is a
strange twist of fate for an executive that has long considered
himself a citizen of the world, accumulating homes and passports on
multiple continents. All four of his children grew up between Paris
and Tokyo before studying at Stanford University. None of them
speak Arabic.
"Since I started to work, this is the longest period I spent in
Lebanon, " Mr. Ghosn said.
Today, the country that once put his face on a postage stamp is
buffeted by violent protests demanding the overthrow of the
Lebanese establishment. "Carlos Ghosn is one of them," said Ahmad
Jammoul, a 21-year-old student who marched in a recent protest.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Ghosn responded that he "is not part of
the Lebanese establishment, has no political role in the country
and does not plan to have any."
The timing of his return hasn't helped. Mr. Ghosn mounted a
costly escape operation -- chartering a private jet to smuggle
himself out of Japan in an audio-equipment box, and forfeiting
close to $15 million in bail money -- while Lebanon was in the
middle of a financial crisis.
Lebanon's borrowing costs soared as investors fled its
sovereign-debt market. Banks, the main holders of Lebanese bonds,
have responded to a cash crunch by restricting customers' access to
their money, including the amounts that can be transferred abroad.
Mr. Ghosn is consulting Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz about selling
his story for film and TV, and has told friends it could help
finance his legal battle.
The latest protests started in October, after the government
proposed a tax on WhatsApp, the popular messaging app. They turned
violent as anger grew at the country's political class, whom people
blame for the collapsing economy.
"This thinking that there is no solution for the problems in
Lebanon, I don't buy it," Mr. Ghosn said. "There is a solution. But
the solution on paper is maybe 5%, but then it's 95% execution.
Same as companies."
Walid Jumblatt, a lawmaker at the center of Lebanese politics,
has called for Mr. Ghosn to be named the country's energy minister.
Mr. Ghosn said he has no interest and that he steers clear of
Lebanon's sectarian politics.
For the first time in decades, Mr. Ghosn has time on his hands.
He and his wife have been hosting dinners for friends inside their
Beirut mansion. He has been reconnecting with childhood classmates,
visiting old haunts, skiing and walking in the mountains. On
Tuesday, he and his wife heard the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra
play Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.
"I need to recover," he said. "Physically, the 14 months in
Japan have been a challenge."
One afternoon last month, he took his 25-year-old son, Anthony,
for the first time to visit the apartment where he grew up. It is
in a working-class neighborhood encircling the ruins of a
fifth-century church. A stronghold of the Maronite Christian
community, the neighborhood has changed little since he left.
A 64-year-old cafe owner tried to approach Mr. Ghosn but was
stopped by his bodyguard. He identified himself as a distant
cousin. The bodyguards backed off.
"Welcome to Lebanon," the man said, explaining to Mr. Ghosn that
they were connected by marriage through a distant relative.
Where was that relative now? Mr. Ghosn asked. The man pointed to
an apartment building across the street from Mr. Ghosn's childhood
home.
Mr. Ghosn was born in Porto Velho, Brazil, in the Amazon jungle,
to Lebanese parents.
His father, Georges Ghosn, took the family back to Lebanon when
Mr. Ghosn was 6 years old. Around that time, Georges Ghosn was
arrested for his involvement in the murder of a priest who was shot
twice, once in the head.
Police said Georges and the priest had been smuggling diamonds
and foreign currency, Lebanon's main French language daily
newspaper reported at the time. Mr. Ghosn's father admitted to the
trafficking but maintained he didn't pull the trigger in the
shooting, the paper said. His sentence was commuted to 15 years of
hard labor after a court ruled the killing wasn't premeditated.
Georges got an early release from jail, when Mr. Ghosn was 16
years old. Four months later he was caught with about $35,000 in
counterfeit cash, the Lebanon paper reported. He was sentenced to
another three years in prison.
Mr. Ghosn declined to comment on his father. His father's
imprisonment was a painful episode for him, said one person who has
spoken to him about it. "It's a credit to him that he overcame it,"
this person said.
In a 2003 autobiography, Mr. Ghosn described his father as a
devout Maronite who shuttled between Brazil and Lebanon for work.
The book didn't mention his imprisonment.
Mr. Ghosn wrote that Lebanon in those days was "the Switzerland
of the Middle East," a sun-kissed financial center that drew
tourists from around the world.
His mother sent him to a private Jesuit school, Notre Dame de
Jamhour, where he was a stellar pupil with a rebellious streak.
Elie Gharios, a childhood friend, said he and young Carlos once
were suspended for writing "down with old people" in red paint on
the side of the 170-year-old school. The future auto executive was
often surrounded by other boys who followed his every order, Mr.
Gharios recalled.
In 1971, Mr. Ghosn graduated from high school and moved to Paris
to continue his education. It was in France that peers started
using a Western pronunciation of his name, with a hard "g" and a
silent "s" in a way that rhymes with "cone." In Arabic, the name
sounds more like "Ho-ssun."
As Mr. Ghosn's auto-industry career took off, he seldom visited
Lebanon. His first major assignment as a young manager at the tire
maker Michelin was in Brazil. People who know him from that period
say he didn't look back.
In 2008, he bought a large stake in a vineyard in Lebanon. A few
years later, after a 2012 divorce, he married his second wife,
Carole. She came from the same Maronite neighborhood in Beirut.
In 2012, Nissan purchased for Mr. Ghosn's use a villa in the
city's Ashrafieh quarter, a neighborhood of stately mansions and
apartments buildings that had given the city its former moniker,
the Paris of the Middle East. Nissan paid about $9.4 million, then
sunk another $7.6 million into renovating it. Carole Ghosn
supervised the job, which included painting the exterior pink and
excavating two ancient sarcophagi now visible beneath a glass floor
leading to the wine cellar.
Mr. Ghosn's arrest in November 2018 marked the start of a
yearlong tug of war with the Japanese justice system. After
spending months in prison, often in solitary confinement, he was
assigned to live in a Tokyo apartment with camera surveillance and
a court order barring contact with his wife, then shuttling between
Lebanon and New York City.
Jumping bail and fleeing to Lebanon reunited Mr. Ghosn with his
wife and gave him a measure of freedom. Interpol issued a "red
notice," indicating he was wanted by Japan for extradition. But
Lebanon doesn't extradite its citizens, which means that Mr. Ghosn
is unlikely to return to face trial in Japan.
Tokyo's deputy chief prosecutor, Takahiro Saito, said in a
written statement that Mr. Ghosn "didn't want to submit to the
judgment of our nation's courts and sought to avoid the punishment
for his own crimes."
Nissan had changed the locks at the Beirut villa after his
arrest, but a Lebanese court ordered the company to hand the new
keys over to Carole Ghosn while the court reviews the matter.
Nissan is trying to evict the Ghosns, and the Ghosns are trying to
buy the house from the company.
After he stepped off a chartered jet in Beirut on Dec. 30, Mr.
Ghosn began laying the groundwork for his new life. He immediately
visited Lebanon's president, who hadn't been warned of Mr. Ghosn's
escape plans, according to people familiar with the matter. His
Lebanese lawyer, who has extensive political contacts in Beirut,
dialed politicians and newspaper editors to gauge their support for
Mr. Ghosn's decision to take refuge in Lebanon.
Mr. Ghosn has been mounting his legal and public-relations
campaign against Nissan and the Japanese government with the zeal
he once brought to running Nissan-Renault. Several times a week, he
takes a car to his Lebanese lawyer's office in central Beirut.
The firm has provided him with a small, corner office
overlooking a school and a church. He uses a videoconferencing room
next door to talk to his other lawyers and public-relations
advisers in Tokyo, Paris and New York.
"I have to take care of myself," he said. "I don't have to take
care of all these companies. I work with a more restricted group of
people. They've been through a lot of battles, but people I can
really count on."
He has filed a lawsuit against Renault alleging the French car
maker owes him a EUR250,000 pension payment after he stepped down
as chairman and chief executive while inside a Tokyo jail. His
lawyers have filed a lawsuit in an Amsterdam court alleging that
Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors unfairly dismissed him as a director
at the companies' Dutch joint-venture. Lawyers representing the
joint venture have said Mr. Ghosn's dismissal was justified.
"It's an unbalanced fight," he said. "The companies have deep
pockets."
Lebanese officials have asked Mr. Ghosn to not say anything that
might create tension between Beirut and Tokyo. That meant toning
down his first public appearance since his escape -- a Jan. 8 news
conference in which he berated Nissan and the Japanese justice
system.
Mr. Ghosn had considered criticizing the Japanese government and
accusing officials of conspiring with Nissan in his downfall,
according to people familiar with the matter. Nissan and J apanese
prosecutors have denied that they conspired to bring down Mr.
Ghosn. Prosecutors said they conducted their own investigation.
On the eve of the news conference, Lebanese officials asked him
to refrain from attacking Japanese officials, these people said. A
spokesperson for the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that
before the news conference, Japan's ambassador to Lebanon had told
Lebanon's president that Mr. Ghosn's "illegal departure from Japan
and arrival in Lebanon is deeply regrettable and can never be
overlooked by the government of Japan."
Lebanese government officials didn't respond to requests for
comment.
In Lebanon, it is a crime for a private citizen to harm
Lebanon's relations with another country.
"I would do nothing beyond reasonable to jeopardize the
relationship between the countries," Mr. Ghosn later said.
Mr. Ghosn also used the news conference to try to quell a
separate controversy. A group of lawyers had petitioned a Lebanese
court to arrest Mr. Ghosn for a trip he made to Israel in 2008 when
he was CEO of Renault. Lebanese citizens are barred from visiting
that country because the two states are still technically at
war.
Mr. Ghosn's legal team countered the petition in court by saying
he made the visit as the head of a French company and shouldn't
face prosecution.
Addressing the TV cameras in Arabic, Mr. Ghosn sounded a note of
contrition. "Of course I apologize for the visit, and I was very
moved that the Lebanese people were affected by it," he said. "The
last thing I wanted to do was hurt the Lebanese people."
--Nazih Osseiran contributed to this article.
Write to Nick Kostov at Nick.Kostov@wsj.com and Sean McLain at
sean.mclain@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 22, 2020 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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