Carlos Ghosn Never Saw It Coming

The takedown of a globe-trotting CEO

- Matthew Campbell, Kae Inoue, Ma Jie, & Ania Nussbaum

One morning last November, several hundred business people filed into an auditorium on the third floor of a skyscraper in Tokyo’s financial district. The occasion was a forum marking the centenary of the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan. Among the keynote speakers was an exemplar of the two countries’ warm relationship: Hiroto Saikawa, the chief executive officer of Nissan Motor Co. and a linchpin of its almost 20-year alliance with France’s Renault SA.

In his address, Saikawa extolled the partnership, a confection of share holdings and joint production whose durability had consistently surprised skeptics. “The alliance allowed us to compete with our major rivals,” said Saikawa, who’s 65, thin, and fairly tall, with a mostly unlined face and cheeks lightly mottled by freckles. He wore rimless glasses, a purple tie, and a dark navy suit with a gold pin in the shape of Nissan’s all-caps logo at the left lapel. Rarely one for elegant rhetoric, he instead boasted of Renault-Nissan’s accomplishments: combined operations that had generated billions in savings, a strong position in electric vehicles, more than 10 million cars sold in 2017.

To those present, the speech was unremarkable, even boring. But as he spoke, Saikawa was harboring a secret known only to a tiny number of Nissan managers and a team of prosecutors in the Special Investigations Unit, an elite arm of Japanese law enforcement. En route to Tokyo at that moment, aboard a Gulf stream G650 with the registration number N155AN, was Carlos Ghosn, the charismatic executive who’d engineered the Renault-Nissan alliance and now served as chairman of both companies. He’d be landing at Haneda airport in less than six hours, prepared for a busy week: a board meeting, discussions with important Japanese officials, then a trip to China. Saikawa knew none of that would take place.