The rise and fall of Carlos Ghosn
Collision Course. By Hans Greimel and William Sposato. Harvard Business Review Press; 256 pages; $30 and £22
THE MAIN events of the scandal that brought down Carlos Ghosn, whose restless energy made other globetrotting bosses look work-shy, are appropriately book-ended by flights on corporate jets. The drama began with grainy television footage of Japanese prosecutors boarding the plane that delivered an unwitting Mr Ghosn to his arrest in Tokyo in November 2018. It culminated in his skipping bail on several charges of financial impropriety around a year later. Stripped of his leadership of a giant conglomerate, he was smuggled out of Japan on another private jet, this time hidden in a box.
Because of that clandestine escape, “Collision Course” by Hans Greimel and William Sposato, two Tokyo-based journalists, at times reads like a spy thriller. But their main aim and achievement is to give the clearest account yet of the deep-rooted causes of Mr Ghosn’s predicament. Underpinning the entire tale—and Mr Ghosn’s status as a corporate superstar—was Renault’s rescue in 1999 of near-bankrupt Nissan, an alliance, later joined by Mitsubishi, which he built into the world’s biggest carmaker.
The terms of Nissan’s bail-out gave Renault, in which the French government has a large...