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.
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