The lawsuit also brings claims against at least a dozen people, including:
- Hari Nada, a Nissan employee, is considered one of the main initiators of the conspiracy to oust Ghosn
- Hidetoshi Imazu and Hitoshi Kawaguchi, two senior Nissan executives who were early involved in Nissan’s actions against Ghosn
- Toshiaki Onuma, a manager in the CEO’s office who, along with Nada, agreed to work with Japanese prosecutors to avoid prosecution
- Masakazu Toyoda and Motoo Nagai, two board members of Nissan
A Nissan spokesman said the company would not comment on the matter.
According to Ghosn’s legal counsel, the lawsuit also includes other individuals and entities that have not yet been served. The Lebanese prosecutor’s office has scheduled a hearing for September. Lebanese authorities may seek cooperation from their Japanese counterparts to investigate Ghosn’s claims.
It is not clear whether Japan’s judicial system, which Ghosn says is “rigged” and “violates the most basic principles of humanity,” would be willing to cooperate with authorities in Lebanon, which does not extradite its citizens.
In 2020, a UN panel found that Ghosn’s more than 100-day detention in a Japanese prison was neither necessary nor appropriate and violated his rights. The decision to arrest Ghosn four times in a row to extend his detention was “fundamentally unfair,” according to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
The 18-page lawsuit details Ghosn’s plan to merge Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi Motors into a grand alliance with Fiat Chrysler, which he says raised concerns at Nissan in early 2018 that he wanted to make the partnership irreversible.
Nada and others then laid the groundwork for Ghosn’s arrest to remove him from Nissan and the alliance, according to Ghosn.
Ghosn also detailed his intentions to take a voluntary pay cut in 2011 after new disclosure rules in Japan sparked efforts to find legal means to keep and pay him in retirement. Those plans eventually became the basis for the arrests of Ghosn and Greg Kelly, a former Nissan director who was involved in the salary negotiations.
A court ruling last year cleared Kelly of most charges and fined Nissan.
Jobs for VW, Ford, GM
Ghosn described how he received job offers from Volkswagen Group and Ford and a more lucrative salary to join General Motors, but decided to stay with Allianz after the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.
He said efforts within Nissan to find ways to compensate and retain him had been criminalized because it was the only “means the conspirators found to get rid of him as CEO.”
Nada and others then ran a “defamation campaign to tarnish his image,” Ghosn alleges in the lawsuit. The lawsuit also details the involvement of the Japanese and French governments, the firing of certain individuals from Nissan following Ghosn’s arrest, problems with the company’s internal investigation into the matter, and the harm the actions have caused to shareholders .
In a way, the lawsuit is the result of Ghosn’s efforts to clear his name after arriving in Lebanon, where he held an epic press conference in early 2020 denouncing his arrest. Ghosn spent part of his childhood in the countryside and lives in a house bought and restored by Nissan, which he planned to buy from the company after he retired.
Portal and Bloomberg contributed to this report