- A Tokyo court gave Greg Kelly, a former American executive at Nissan Motor charged with underreporting his boss Carlos Ghosn’s pay, a suspended sentence, but cleared him of most of the charges.
- Kelly was arrested in November 2018 at the same time as Ghosn, a former Nissan chairman and head of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. Both insist they are innocent and that the money in question was never paid or decided on.
- The trial at Tokyo District Court began in September 2020, with Ghosn absent after he jumped bail in late 2019, hiding in a box for music instruments on a private jet. He fled to Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Japan, and has been writing books and making movies about his experiences.
- Chief judge Kenji Shimotsu slammed Ghosn, saying the compensation arrangement was “conducted solely out of his personal greed”. “There is absolutely no room for extenuating circumstances in his motive,” he said. In trying to undercut the intent of disclosure rules, it was one of the “most malicious cases”. Prosecutors had asked that Kelly be sentenced to two years in prison. They alleged Ghosn, Kelly and Nissan Motor Co. underreported Ghosn’s compensation by 9 billion yen (USD 78 million) in filings over eight years through 2018.
- Shimotsu said in the ruling that some financial reports contained false information, but that the testimony from a key witness, a Nissan executive who reported directly to Ghosn, was the most important but was not entirely reliable because he had a plea bargain. “His credibility deserves special attention. There was a danger that as an accomplice he would seek to shift responsibility to Ghosn,” Shimotsu said.
- He said that the court found that Ghosn and Ohnuma were aware they were reporting false information and “conspired together” to do so. During the trial, the prosecution presented as evidence various documents calculating Ghosn’s so-called “deferred compensation”.
- Nissan, based in the port city of Yokohama, owns 34 per cent of smaller Japanese automaker Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Motor. The French government owns 15 per cent of Renault. Japanese executives tend to be paid far less than their American counterparts, an important factor in the trial.
- Disclosure of high executive pay became required in Japan in 2010, and what was disclosed for Ghosn, at about USD 9.5 million even without the deferred compensation, had raised eyebrows.
- Kelly was hired by Nissan’s US division in 1988, more than a decade before Ghosn arrived at Nissan, and became a representative director in 2012, the first American on Nissan’s board. He worked mostly in legal counsel and human resources.
- The conviction rate in Japanese criminal trials exceeds 99 per cent.
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