Apr 05 (Nikkei) - Carlos Ghosn, the former head of the Nissan-Renault automaking alliance, maintained his innocence in a video taken before his fourth arrest in Japan Thursday on new charges of misusing corporate money.
"I'm appealing to the French government to defend me and to preserve my rights as a citizen trapped in an unbelievable chain of events abroad," Ghosn told French news channel LCI in an interview via video call partially released online Thursday.
"I'm ready for a fight. I'm innocent. It's tough, you have to know that," he added.
Thursday's arrest marks an escalation of the battle between the Brazilian-born Frenchman and Japanese prosecutors seeking to portray him as a rogue executive who turned Nissan Motor into his personal property.
Ghosn, who has maintained his innocence since his first arrest last November, has turned again to the media to try to wrest control of the narrative. He was arrested a day after he wrote on his new Twitter account that he will "tell the truth about what is happening" at a news conference next week.
Tokyo prosecutors, meanwhile, are turning up the pressure on the former executive. While his first three arrests were based on somewhat lighter allegations -- such as failing to report compensation in annual securities filings -- the arrest this time was over suspicion of diverting Nissan money to a bank account controlled by Ghosn and directly inflicting damage on the automaker.
The breakthrough for prosecutors came when they succeeded in identifying the exact bank account used in the alleged scheme. They initially had difficulty gathering evidence on the Middle East transactions. But by going through email and accounting documentation provided by Nissan, they landed on an account controlled by a Lebanese company.
"Lots of lies are being told, and those lies are being revealed one after another," Ghosn told LCI. "Not a single day, a single week, passes without new accusations. There are several people inside Nissan who are the cause of that," he said, suggesting a plot against him at the Japanese automaker.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told local news channel BFM on Thursday that Ghosn "should benefit from the presumption of innocence." Le Maire said his own role was to ensure the smooth governance of Renault, which is 15% owned by the French state.
Ghosn recorded another video before his arrest, said Junichiro Hironaka, who leads the former auto executive's defense team. Hironaka did not say when that video would be released.
Source: ANNnewsCH
