Skip to main content

Carlos Ghosn

Image result for Ghosn

I only recently learned how to pronounce this fellow's name!

The "s" is silent, and the name rhymes with "Lone."

That's one of the minor revelations of a fascinating Bloomberg feature about how and why Carlos Ghosn, the grim faced fellow portrayed here, was taken down when he was.

To review: In November, authorities in Japan arrested Ghosn on complicated charges of financial fraud and less complicated charges of tax cheating. This is huge in the world auto industry. Ghosn was the chairman of the board at both Nissan and of Renault, and the central figure in the historic alliance between the two. That alliance had recently (2016) added Mitsubishi to the fold.

So: what does Bloomberg have to tell us, aside from the useful pronunciation reference?

It is perhaps unsurprising that someone of Ghosn's prominence and wealth had rivals and, one may plainly say, enemies. Among them, apparently, was his own second-in-command at one of the three allied companies, the CEO of Nissan, Hiroto Saikawa. The team of four authors who wrote the Bloomberg piece tells us that Ghosn's fall was "more than the comeuppance of an executive who flew his Gulfstream too close to the sun. It looks like a palace coup."

Ghosn wanted to restructure the alliance companies in a proper merger of Nissan and Renault so that they would no longer, for example, have separate CEOs. Further, he may have blamed Saikawa for an emissions-testing scandal in which Nissan had become embroiled not long before, so Saikawa might reasonably have feared that when the merger happened, he would not get the job of CEO within the new structure.

So, not to put a nice ribbon on it: Saikawa turned rat.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more