He’s a clever and persuasive character and I don’t know whether to believe him or not yet. The next few months should be absolutely fascinating to anybody who’s interested in the different ways of different national characters. I can see a book and a movie coming out of this.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-51031744/carlos-ghosn-holds-news-conference

Comparing the alleged set-up job to Pearl Harbour was not a classy move. This will be interesting indeed.

Very little came out of the press conference that we didn’t know or have good suspicion of already; no legal representation, forced confessions, threats to family, solitary confinement, little exercise, long translation delays, no medicine. The collusion by Nissan with prosecutors allegation is effectively proven with the entrapment and arrest of Mr Kelly.

I suppose we learnt that there’s no deal with Netflix yet.

The only unanswered question is how, given Japan’s J-SOX rules, he could possibly have committed the alleged crimes without anyone on the Japanese side being part of it.

Doesn’t mean he’s innocent of course.

What ajaj said.  Japanese legal system from what I’ve read seems to only grant bail after an admission of guilt and you can be imprisoned without trial whilst waiting for the police to gather all the evidence they need.

The only unanswered question is how, given Japan’s J-SOX rules, he could possibly have committed the alleged crimes without anyone on the Japanese side being part of it.

That’s basically the problem for Japan. Top executives are paid much less than in other countries, so there is a lot of incentive to hide compensation. Some of it will be legitimate perks, but a massive amount will be illegal because they are publicly traded companies and it hasn’t been declared. Although Japanese companies are sometimes prosecuted for this, no Japanese executive has been treated the way Ghosn was. Ghosn’s crimes came to light because of a whistleblower within Nissan, meaning that a bunch of other Nissan executives knew what was going on, but they weren’t treated nearly as harshly as Ghosn. It’s pretty clear that this all came about because Ghosn wanted a formal merger between Nissan and Renault, but the Japanese executives did not want was would effectively be a foreign takeover. Ghosn sounds like an utter prick, but the bigger problem is that corporate Japan has huge corruption problems and the prosecutors do not seem interested in doing their jobs properly.