If other people embezzle as well, send them to prison, but there’s no universe in which Ghosn is clean. And there are plenty of big companies ran by people who aren’t so morally bankrupt.
Well, selective justice is a form of injustice. I only have superficial knowledge of the Ghosn saga, but if what the GP alleges is true, then it's not fair to Ghosn that he's prosecuted for something that others get a pass. Of course, I take your point that it's entirely possible to be a bigcorp CEO without fraud and self-dealing.
To scale it down, lots of people drive over the speed limit, which is against the law; but only some people get pulled over and ticketed for it. Many people also observe the speed limit. In the Ghosn analogy, suppose that Japanese drivers got a pass, but foreigners didn't.
Should everyone get pulled over the instant they exceed the speed limit? Do we want to live in such a world? Is it just a matter of scale, the difference between driving a car too fast vs. stealing millions of dollars from your employer?
If the government decides to get more serious about this stuff, there will be firsts! There will be people who "got away with it"! It's never applied perfectly evenly. You gotta start somewhere.
Of course the way he was thrown around, when they could have impounded a bunch of his assets and just restricted his movements... the police have their ways of doing things and restriction of speech in particular to avoid coverups is probably a huge chunk of their motivations.
Ghosn isn't the first executive in Japan to ever be arrested. But maybe the police felt the stakes were too high. During the Livedoor scandal, Horie had to post a 300 million yen bond for his temporary freedom, and that was for an "internet company". How much would Ghosn's bond need to be in comparison? Not saying that this is the right way to go about things, but it feels at least consistent.
Sure. But if that "somewhere" just happens to be the literal 1 foreigner among literally hundreds of CEOs doing the same thing, there will naturally be raised eyebrows.
In places with speed cameras, that is exactly what happens. There’s no better way to find an unjust law than to enforce it evenly.
And scale is very important! In your analogy, many CEOs are speeding, some driving 5mph over, some 10mph, but Carlos was tripling the speed limit and then sawed through the bars of the courthouse before he saw trial. It’s insane to me that people are defending it. If you don’t want to be selectively prosecuted for massively embezzling company funds - don’t embezzle company funds..
He had secretly bought himself a 140ft yacht with stolen company funds!
https://img.20mn.fr/FofgQudYQhKtDOGwCHCuRyk/1444x920_un-cust...
Really? Why did none of that come through in the court case then? I don't like the norm of giving CEOs valuable benefits instead of cash, but it's undeniably an accepted norm, especially in Japan.
He was convicted for the deferred pension compensation that he had not yet actually received, and for one year, despite the fact pattern being the same every year. The court blatantly made the minimum possible conviction because they knew none of the charges had merit but couldn't possibly acquit him.
The French have multiple arrest warrants for him due to multiple overlapping fraud and embezzlement cases: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230704-second-french...
The BVI found that tens of millions of dollars stored there and the luxury yacht bought with Nissan’s funds and registered to a Shell company owned by Ghosn’s son, actually did belong to Nissan.. and on and on.
Why does anyone give that absolute creep the benefit of the doubt? It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!
That looks to be one side's claims, and even this one-sided telling acknowledges that he never received any of that money, and that the CFO and finance department signed off on what happened.
> It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!
He fled the country after being detained and isolated (especially from his wife) for literally years without actually being charged or getting to trial. They were blatantly trying to break him without having to go to the trouble of actually proving a case. And the trial I'm talking about, that convicted him on exactly one count, was held in his absence after he escaped and had no reason to not throw everything at him.
If and when he's convicted in a fair trial under international norms where he gets a fair chance to defend himself, I'll condemn him for that. But until then I'm not going to take the allegations of the people who wanted him gone at face value.
