With the gigafactory-sized exception of Elon Musk, heads of auto manufacturers aren’t normally the subject of international news cycles. Yet for months on end, Carlos Ghosn, head of both Renault and Nissan, was frequently in the news.
The saga began in November of 2018, when he boarded a routine flight to Japan. When the plane touched down, he was arrested and charged with multiple crimes of financial misconduct. The powerful CEO, revered across the globe for his business acumen and ability to perform miraculous transformations, was blindsided.
For all of the following year, Ghosn was powerless. He lingered in a Tokyo prison cell, where he had virtually no communication with the outside world. His health declined as the stress and isolation took its toll.
He was eventually granted house arrest, after posting a $9 million bail. But he remained ensnared in a legal system with a 99 percent conviction rate.
Then, on December 29, 2019, something remarkable happened. A former Green Beret wheeled a large crate onto a plane at Kansai International Airport, located in the south of Japan. He managed to sail through security with his precious cargo.
Inside the crate was none other than 63-year-old Carlos Ghosn, curled up and drawing oxygen through a small hole. When the plane landed many hours later, in Lebanon, Ghosn was not only in his home country, but one which had no extradition policy with Japan. It was an escape for the ages: masterfully orchestrated and carried out. A 10 out of 10.
The Last Flight, directed by Nick Green, is one of a number of documentaries to explore this wild story. It’s a drama that’s often hard to make heads or tails of, even when the details and sequence of events are nicely laid out, as they are in this film.
Part of the reason Ghosn’s story has attracted so much media attention is owing to the man himself. He’s a charismatic, outspoken, and intelligent man with a cosmopolitan aura and supremely self-assured demeanor.
The first part of the film covers Carlos Ghosn’s eclectic upbringing and staggering rise up the corporate ladder.
He was born in Brazil, in 1954; several years later, his family moved to Lebanon. Ghosn would end up receiving his higher education in Paris, where he graduated with degrees in engineering.
Following college, he took a job at Michelin, the renowned tire company headquartered in France. For the next fifteen years, he enjoyed a burgeoning career. He held high level positions while living in locations ranging from Bogota, Columbia to Greenville, South Carolina.
Then, in the mid 90s, Ghosn was approached by a headhunter for Renault, the automaker also based in France. Ghosn at first brushed aside the offer, but ultimately accepted.
He quickly made a name for himself. His modus operandi of extreme efficiency amounted to huge dividends for the company. On the flip side, it also produced scores of disgruntled employees who suddenly found themselves without a job. Many of them took to the streets in protest, and the French press labeled him “Le Cost Cutter.”
Nonetheless, Ghosn’s status at Renault continued to grow. When the company acquired a piece of the ailing Japanese giant, Nissan—which was $20 billion in debt at the time—Ghosn was tapped for the role of COO. He approached the challenge with his customary energy and vowed to harness “the strength of the French and the strength of the Japanese.” As Ghosn says later in the film, however, it was a partnership that Nissan entered into not out of enthusiasm, but out of “necessity”— the company desperately needed someone to bail them out.
Ghosn turned out to be the right choice for the role, because against considerable odds, he restored the flagging company into a monumental success.
Fast forward ten years, and Ghosn had the rare distinction of being the CEO of not one but two global companies. He was at the head of the Nissan-Renault alliance. He was an international business superstar.
Life was good for Ghosn. He’d divorced earlier in life, but remarried in 2016. That same year he hosted an extravagant party at the Palace of Versailles, in the theme of Louis XIV. Ghosn was a man who had it all: wealth, prestige, love.
That world came crashing down when Ghosn was slapped with a barrage of criminal charges, including underreporting his salary and misusing company funds. Instead of the focus being on Ghosn’s remarkable ability to manage huge companies, it was now Ghosn’s lavish lifestyle that became the subject of attention. His luxurious homes and his expensive parties…had Nissan unknowingly been footing at the bills?
According to Carlos Ghosn, all of it is bogus. He never received money he wasn’t owed; he never underreported his salary; he never wrangled deals that were below board.
Both then and now, Ghosn has always maintained his innocence. “I was the victim of a plot,” he says adamantly in The Last Flight. For a long time, however, Ghosn struggled to understand the “why.”
Ultimately, he came to believe that his persecution could be traced to a growing “level of distrust between the Japanese side of the alliance and the attitude of the French government.” The latter had acquired a 15% stake in Renault, and given that Renault owned 43% of Nissan, the Japanese automaker worried that they were rapidly losing control. The company did not want to be at the whims of the French government.
In arresting Ghosn, in other words—and destroying his reputation and potentially getting a confession—the upper echelon at Nissan could rid themselves of an increasingly fraught relationship and an overall intolerable situation. That, at any rate, seems to be Ghosn’s theory.
It also largely squares with the views of Ravinder Passi, former general counsel of Nissan, who was tasked with looking into the allegations surrounding Ghosn. When he discovered alarming conflicts of interests and brought them to light, they were ignored. Not only were they ignored, but Passi began to be followed, as if he were a character in a John le Carré spy novel. Eventually, he was dismissed from the company.
By the end of The Last Flight, it’s difficult to know what to think of Ghosn’s convoluted drama. That’s not the fault of the film nor its director, however. The saga of Carlos Ghosn seems to be a tale where half-truths emanate from every side, and where only the principal characters themselves know what they did or didn’t do (or what their motivations were or were not).
In the latest iteration of this international drama, Ghosn has sued Nissan for a whopping one billion dollars. It’s the kind of gargantuan sum that seems entirely in line with this Hollywood-esque blockbuster.
Spectatio 