Status: 04/22/2022 3:52 p.m
The French judiciary has issued an arrest warrant for car manager Carlos Ghosn, who spectacularly fled to Lebanon. The investigation is about embezzlement of funds and money laundering.
New developments in the case of the dazzling ex-car boss Carlos Ghosn: The French judiciary has issued an international arrest warrant against him for alleged misappropriation of assets at Renault and money laundering. A total of five arrest warrants were issued in the course of the investigation, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre near Paris announced today.
In addition to the former Nissan boss, these were also directed against the current and former heads of the Oman-based car trading company Suhail Bahwan Automobiles (SBA). According to the French judiciary, there are suspicious payments of almost 15 million euros between the alliance of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi and SBA.
Arrest warrant for Ghosn’s lawyer ‘very surprising’
Ghosn once saved the Japanese car company Nissan from bankruptcy and forged the alliance of the three car manufacturers. On November 19, 2018, he and his former right-hand man, the American Greg Kelly, were arrested in Tokyo and charged with violating stock exchange regulations, among other things.
The Japanese judiciary accused them, among other things, of having transferred private losses to the car manufacturer Nissan. While Kelly remained in Japan, Ghosn fled to Beirut via Turkey in late 2019, violating strict bail requirements. The ex-manager with French, Brazilian and Lebanese citizenship was hidden in a box for musical instruments.
Since then, Ghosn has also been wanted by Japan on an international arrest warrant. He is not allowed to leave Lebanon, which does not extradite him. One of his lawyers, Jean Tamalet, called the arrest warrant from Nanterre “very surprising”. The prosecutors and judges there know very well that Ghosn is not allowed to leave Lebanon, he told the AFP news agency.
Ghosn denies wrongdoing
The former boss of the three-way alliance repeatedly rejected the allegations against him. The 68-year-old sees himself as a victim of a conspiracy to prevent closer ties between Nissan and Renault. In February, Ghosn complained to the newspaper Le Parisien that the French government and Renault’s board of directors had “stabbed him fatally in the back”. Renault is a civil plaintiff in Nanterre.
The investigations in France revolve around the suspicious payments between the Dutch subsidiary of the auto alliance RNVB and SBA as well as two expensive parties at the Palace of Versailles – here the Paris public prosecutor is investigating.
Representatives of the Nanterre Public Prosecutor’s Office have traveled to Lebanon twice so far. In February, they questioned two Witnesses there. They had already spoken to Ghosn himself last summer.
Renault with the highest drop in sales since 2009
Meanwhile, Renault today reported the highest decline in sales in more than ten years. In the first quarter, sales fell by 17 percent to 552,000 vehicles due to the presence in Russia and the global lack of semiconductors, as the French carmaker announced. Deliveries had not fallen so sharply since the peak of the financial crisis in 2009.
Despite the sharp drop in sales, Renault turned over more than expected. Although sales shrank by 2.7 percent to 9.7 billion euros. However, that was not as strong a drop as feared by analysts. Thanks to higher prices and increasing sales of electric cars, the carmaker was able to make up for some. Without the subsidiary Avtovaz and Renault Russia, sales fell by only one percent.
Meanwhile, according to circles, the Renault board of directors is said to be considering a partial sale of its approximately 43 percent stake in Nissan. The Japanese carmaker could buy back some of its own papers, the news agency reported Bloomberg. The alliance between Renault and Nissan almost collapsed in 2018 as a result of the scandal surrounding their former CEO Ghosn.