83 Facts About Carlos Ghosn

Carlos Ghosn is a Lebanese, Brazilian and French businessman and former automotive executive.

Carlos Ghosn undertook major organisational changes, introducing a lean production system with delegate responsibilities inspired by Japanese systems, reforming work methods and centralising research and development at its Technocentre to reduce vehicle conception costs while accelerating such conception.

Carlos Ghosn quickly achieved celebrity status in Japan and in the business world, and his life has been chronicled in Japanese comics.

Carlos Ghosn stepped down as CEO of Nissan on 1 April 2017, while remaining Chairman of the company.

Carlos Ghosn was arrested at Tokyo International Airport on 19 November 2018, on allegations of under-reporting his salary and gross misuse of company assets.

However, they ultimately found the situation untenable and Carlos Ghosn was made to retire as chairman and CEO of Renault on 24 January 2019.

Carlos Ghosn's grandfather was Bichara Carlos Ghosn, a Maronite Catholic who emigrated from Ajaltoun, French Mandate Lebanon to Brazil at the age of 13, eventually settling in remote Guapore, Rondonia, near the border between Brazil and Bolivia.

Bichara Carlos Ghosn was an entrepreneur and eventually headed several companies, in businesses including the rubber trade, the sale and purchase of agricultural products, and aviation.

Carlos Ghosn's son Jorge Ghosn married Rose Jazzar, a Nigerian-born Lebanese woman whose family came from Miziara in Lebanon then went to Brazil, where they settled in Porto Velho, the state capital of Rondonia, and had four children.

Carlos' father, Jorge Ghosn was a diamond trader and worked in the airline industry.

Carlos Ghosn was born on 9 March 1954, in Porto Velho.

Carlos Ghosn did not fully recover there, and in 1960, when Ghosn was six years old, he and his mother and sister moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where his grandmother and two other sisters lived.

Carlos Ghosn completed his secondary school studies in Lebanon, at the Jesuit school College Notre-Dame de Jamhour.

Carlos Ghosn then completed his classes preparatoires in Paris, at the College Stanislas and the Lycee Saint-Louis.

Carlos Ghosn graduated as an engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1974 and the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 1978.

In 1985, when Carlos Ghosn was 30 years old, he was appointed chief operating officer of Michelin's South American operations.

Carlos Ghosn returned to Rio de Janeiro, reporting directly to Francois Michelin, who tasked Ghosn with turning around the operation, which was unprofitable and struggling under Brazil's hyperinflation.

Carlos Ghosn formed cross-functional management teams to determine best practices among the French, Brazilian, and other nationalities working in the South American division.

Carlos Ghosn was promoted to CEO of Michelin North America in 1990.

Carlos Ghosn presided over the restructuring of the company after its acquisition of the Uniroyal Goodrich Tyre Company.

In 1996, Carlos Ghosn became executive vice president in charge of purchasing, advanced research, engineering and development, powertrain operations, and manufacturing at Renault; and he was in charge of Renault's South American division, located in the Mercosur.

Carlos Ghosn promised to resign if these goals were not met.

Carlos Ghosn was the fourth non-Japanese person to lead a Japanese automaker, after Mark Fields, Henry Wallace and James Miller were appointed by Ford to run Mazda in the late 1990s.

Carlos Ghosn defied Japanese business etiquette in various ways, including by eliminating seniority-based and age-based promotion, by changing lifetime employment from a guarantee to a desired goal for when the company achieved high performance, and by dismantling Nissan's keiretsu system; an interwoven web of parts suppliers with cross-holdings in Nissan.

Carlos Ghosn changed Nissan's official company language from Japanese to English, and included executives from Europe and North America in key global strategy sessions for the first time.

In May 2005, Carlos Ghosn was named president and chief executive officer of Renault.

When he assumed the CEO roles at both Renault and Nissan, Carlos Ghosn became the world's first person to run two companies on the Fortune Global 500 simultaneously.

Carlos Ghosn refused, reportedly saying the only way he would come to the struggling company was if he was named both the CEO and chairman of the board.

Carlos Ghosn was a visible leader in recovery efforts after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011, one of the worst natural disasters in modern history.

Carlos Ghosn appeared on television in Japan to encourage optimism.

In May 2011, Carlos Ghosn remained committed to building at least 1 million of Nissan's cars and trucks in Japan annually.

In 2011 Carlos Ghosn was under scrutiny by the French government for mishandling a spying scandal related to Renault.

In June 2012, Carlos Ghosn was named deputy chairman of the board of directors of Russian automobile manufacturer AvtoVAZ.

In February 2017, Carlos Ghosn announced he would step down as CEO of Nissan on 1 April 2017, while remaining chairman of the company.

Carlos Ghosn served on the International Advisory Board of Brazilian bank Banco Itau until 2015.

Carlos Ghosn is a member of the advisory board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing.

Carlos Ghosn has received an honorary doctorate from American University of Beirut; and he is a member of the Strategic Council, Saint Joseph University of Beirut.

Carlos Ghosn serves as governor of the World Economic Forum.

Leaks to the media said that Carlos Ghosn had planned to call a vote to fire Nissan CEO Saikawa and reinstate Kelly to active service at the scheduled board meeting.

Carlos Ghosn was detained at the Tokyo Detention House, under Japanese rules that allow suspects to be detained for up to 23 days without criminal charges being filed.

On 21 December 2018, Carlos Ghosn was re-arrested on suspicion of shifting to Nissan personal losses of US$16.6 million related to a personal swap contract in October 2008.

Carlos Ghosn made his first public appearance after his arrest at an arraignment on Tuesday, 8 January 2019, where he asserted his innocence, making a statement in response to the main allegations against him; however, his bid to be released from prison on these charges was rejected.

Carlos Ghosn's imprisonment was set to end on 11 January 2019.

That day, Carlos Ghosn was indicted on two additional charges: aggravated breach of trust and understating his income, extending his imprisonment.

Two days later, Nissan's investigation allegedly found that, in addition to the underreporting of salary already charged, Carlos Ghosn had paid himself an undisclosed $8 million in 2018 from a Netherlands-based joint venture owned by Nissan and Mitsubishi that was set up in 2017, without the knowledge of either company's directors because Carlos Ghosn had the sole authority to dispense cash from the venture.

Carlos Ghosn again appealed the denial of bail from 8 January 2019 and offered to meet greater restrictions and higher guarantees of appearance in return for his release, including wearing an ankle bracelet and posting his Nissan stock as collateral.

Takashi Takano, one of Carlos Ghosn's lawyers stated that the Japanese judicial system is a country risk.

Carlos Ghosn resigned as chairman and CEO of Renault on 24 January 2019.

On 30 January 2019, Carlos Ghosn said the charges were "plot and treason" by executives at Nissan who opposed the relationship with Renault and a future plan that was in the works to integrate Nissan, Mitsubishi and Renault.

In early March 2019, Carlos Ghosn was granted a request for bail in a Tokyo court.

Carlos Ghosn was not allowed to travel abroad, and had to remain at a given address under 24-hour camera surveillance, with no internet access.

On 3 April 2019, Carlos Ghosn tweeted that he was "ready to tell the truth" and that he would hold a conference on 11 April 2019.

Carlos Ghosn was re-arrested for the fourth time early on 4 April 2019 over new suspicions of financial misconduct concerning alleged dealings via Oman.

Carlos Ghosn released a statement claiming the arrest was "outrageous and arbitrary".

The next day, Carlos Ghosn posted a YouTube video, where he publicly stated that he was "innocent of all the accusations that came around these charges that are all biased, taken out of context, twisted in a way to paint a personage of greed, and a personage of dictatorship".

Carlos Ghosn claimed that the payments to Juffali were meant to help Nissan fix a dispute with a local distributor, and to open a bank contract to convert his salary from yen to US dollars, in order to avoid currency swings.

In June 2019 Renault published that in an internal audit they had uncovered 11 million euros in questionable expenses by Carlos Ghosn, which was followed by the French state opening its own investigation into his actions.

In September 2019, in one of the first legal accords of the saga, Carlos Ghosn settled with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over claims of failing to disclose more than $140 million in pay to him from Nissan.

Carlos Ghosn was fined $1 million while Nissan was fined $15 million and Greg Kelly $100,000.

On 30 December 2019, numerous media outlets reported that Carlos Ghosn had escaped from Japan and arrived in Beirut, Lebanon.

Carlos Ghosn later confirmed these reports through a statement released by his press representative in New York.

Carlos Ghosn left his Tokyo apartment at around 14:30 on 29 December 2019 and joined two men at a nearby hotel.

The large box carrying Carlos Ghosn was never x-rayed or checked by customs officials, because it was too big to fit inside the x-ray machine; the plane left Kansai Airport at 23:10, landing at Istanbul Ataturk Airport at 5:26 on the morning of 30 December 2019.

The Ambassador of Lebanon to Japan Nidal Yehya denied the involvement of the Embassy of Lebanon in Carlos Ghosn's escape, but "always stressed to him that he must abide by all the conditions of his release, as decided by the Criminal Court in Tokyo".

Carlos Ghosn held his first press conference since leaving Japan on 8 January 2020, in which he described his imprisonment conditions, pleaded innocence and named Nissan executives who plotted his demise.

Carlos Ghosn's lawyer, Junichiro Hironaka, said his escape was a "complete surprise".

On 10 February 2020, Carlos Ghosn hired former Disney president Michael Ovitz, co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency, as his Hollywood agent.

On 8 July 2020, The Nikkei reported that $862,500 was paid from a Paris bank account related to Carlos Ghosn to Promote Fox, a company managed by Michael Taylor, an ex-Green Beret who helped him flee to Lebanon.

On 3 November 2020, Lebanon's prosecutor general decided not to charge Carlos Ghosn for visiting Israel in 2008 because the statute of limitations had expired.

Previously, some Lebanese lawyers wanted Carlos Ghosn prosecuted over his 2008 trip to Israel as the chairman of Renault-Nissan to meet Better Place founder Shai Agassi, which they claim violated the Arab League boycott of Israel.

Carlos Ghosn is under two investigations in France, one that is focused on suspicious transactions between Renault and a distributor in Oman, as well as another investigation into alleged illegal payments for private trips and events paid by Renault-Nissan's Netherlands-based holding company, RNBV.

In June 2021, Michael Taylor and his son Peter, pleaded guilty in Tokyo to helping Carlos Ghosn escape from Japan in December 2019.

Carlos Ghosn said the timing of this warrant was "suspicious" and later mentioned that he wanted to stand trial on charges of financial wrongdoing to clear his name.

In May 2016, Carlos Ghosn married Lebanese-American Carole Nahas and, a few months later in October, threw a large party at the Grand Trianon of the Palace of Versailles, in the outskirts of Paris, to celebrate both the wedding and Carole's 50th birthday.

Carlos Ghosn is reported by several Japanese media to have six private residences: in Tokyo, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Beirut and New York.

Carlos Ghosn has been noted for his direct, results-and-execution-oriented style in business strategy meetings, and for his interest in resolving problems from within a company by listening to workers and by cross-functional and cross-cultural team groupings.

Carlos Ghosn is a partner in Ixsir, a winery in the northern coastal town of Batroun, Lebanon.

Carlos Ghosn was hailed as a potential presidential candidate in Lebanon in 2007.

Carlos Ghosn's lawyers have stated he has chronic kidney disease which they claim was worsened by his lack of access to proper treatment while imprisoned.

Carlos Ghosn's face has been reproduced both in Lebanese postage stamps and in bento boxes in Japanese restaurants.

Carlos Ghosn is the subject of a number of books in English, Japanese, and French.

Carlos Ghosn was the subject of another business book called Turnaround: How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan by David Magee.

Carlos Ghosn provided strategic business commentary and on-the-job lessons to aspiring managers in a book called The Ghosn Factor: 24 Inspiring Lessons From Carlos Ghosn, the Most Successful Transnational CEO by Miguel Rivas-Micoud.