It has been said in newspapers, cable news and by the wanted man himself: Carlos Ghosn’s story was made for the screen. The disgraced former Nissan and Renault boss’s escape from Japan while awaiting trial for alleged financial misconduct in December 2019 seemed like a sequence ripped from a Hollywood heist film – a meticulously arranged plot involving an audio equipment box, a private jet and a close call with Japanese airport security. Its success was an embarrassment for Japanese authorities and the subject of both international consternation and intrigue.
Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn, a new docuseries from Apple TV+, does indeed dramatize the plot (including Ghosn’s POV in the box, scrunched in the dark with holes poked for air) with commentary from Ghosn and his smugglers: Mike Taylor, a Massachusetts-based ex-Green Beret with ties to Lebanon and, to a lesser extent, his son Peter. (Both Taylors were later extradited and convicted in Japan, where they served nearly two years in solitary confinement, while Ghosn remained free in Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty; the tension from such reversed fates animates the final episode of the series.) But over four episodes, the Apple series, based on the book Boundless: The Rise, Fall and Escape of Carlos Ghosn by the Wall Street Journal reporters Nick Kostov and Sean McLain, also explores the vast, murky terrain of international megawealth, corporate intrigue and shady financial dealings. Ghosn, who has dismissed the charges in Japan as a conspiracy to prevent his merger of Nissan with Renault, still faces an arrest warrant from France alleging misuse of corporate funds and money laundering, among other financial crimes.
“It’s one of those stories where, like, the deeper you go, and the more layers you peel away, the darker and more twisted it becomes,” said the series’ director, James Jones. “It is a complicated story. It’s not black and white. It’s not necessarily even victim or villain.”
The Apple series, like the BBC series The Last Flight and the Netflix film Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn before it, charts Ghosn’s rise and fall from celebrated business executive – the exalted mastermind behind the partnership between the French automaker Renault and struggling Japanese manufacturer Nissan – to international fugitive. (The former series was made with Ghosn’s cooperation, the latter without access to him; while Ghosn and his wife, Carole, participate in the Apple series from their home in Beirut, they had no editorial input.) Born in the Brazilian Amazon to Lebanese immigrants and educated in France, Ghosn embodied the triumph of globalized business – multilingual, regionally implacable, with allies and assets spanning multiple continents. Early episodes outline the double-edged sword of Ghosn’s celebrity: a shrewd leader blessed with the Midas touch and a ruthless cost-cutting streak (much to the chagrin of Japanese and French autoworkers whose plants he shuttered), an egotist with a taste for luxury and excessive compensation in the mold of American capitalism. (Ghosn once drew condemnation in the French press for a lavish, Renault-funded birthday party at Versailles.)
Ghosn “saw himself as having an American business mindset where, as the CEO, he runs a company – the success is down to him and he deserves to be compensated whatever he wants”, said Jones. “But the problem is that France and Japan did not share that view. And there was always that backlash.”
Both the Japanese and French investigations into Ghosn involved issues of executive compensation, though the series is careful to delineate between the relatively opaque Japanese charges (and Ghosn’s harsh treatment in what has been described as a “hostage justice system”) and the more substantial allegations in France. Japanese prosecutors, working with Nissan, alleged that Ghosn concealed income of about ¥9.1bn ($79m), which Nissan planned to pay Ghosn after he retired, between 2010 and 2018, when he was arrested after touching down at Tokyo international airport. Ghosn, who denied all charges, was detained for 13 months under 24-hour surveillance and faced 10 years in prison.
The series amasses convincing evidence that the charges were at least in part motivated by fear over a potential Nissan merger, with underhanded maneuvers that recall the backstabbing deals of Succession, and that Ghosn understandably believed he would not get a fair shake in Japan, where prosecutors have an almost 99% conviction rate in cases that go to trial. (Ghosn has since sued Nissan for $1bn, alleging defamation and lost income.) An American former Nissan executive named Greg Kelly, who participated in the series, was lured to Japan and similarly arrested and detained; he was convicted of helping Ghosn under-report his compensation and sentenced to six months in prison.
The final episode deals with the French investigation, which arose after inquiries into the Japanese charges revealed questionable financial dealings between Ghosn, Renault and a car dealership in Oman. French prosecutors allege that Ghosn funneled nearly €15m (about $16.2m) in Renault funds through the Omani distributor for personal use, including the purchase of a 120ft yacht. Asked on camera about the French charges, Ghosn is defiant and loquacious, offering a dense rebuttal involving shareholders, sons, payments and signatures. “He has a way of answering those questions by just kind of throwing detail at you, and stirring up this cloud of dust,” said Jones. “And so it almost makes it so impenetrable and boring that it’s unusable, rather than denying it or refusing to answer, which would – and he understands this – make for good television, because he didn’t really have an answer.
“This is a very clever guy,” he added. “And he’s used to being able to kind of use detail to get himself out of situations and when he isn’t really on the most solid ground.”
If there’s a logic to Ghosn’s protestations of innocence, it’s the belief in the ultra-high value of the CEO, and the distinctly modern idea that reaching the top of the corporate hierarchy justifies exorbitant wealth. “On a moral level, I’m certain Carlos Ghosn thinks he did nothing wrong,” said Jones. “He thinks he was worth more money, and he found ways to compensate himself more fairly, as he saw it. But the problem is that it wasn’t Carlos Ghosn, Inc. He may have saved the companies, but he worked for two companies. He was an employee of these two companies with shareholders … he had to answer to these people, you have to play by their rules.”
The series explicitly poses the question of Carlos Ghosn: victim or villain? With blurred lines, overlapping narratives and convoluted paper trails, it doesn’t land on a simple answer. “I don’t think you deny that he was a victim at one point in the story – the charges against him [in Japan] and his treatment were totally disproportionate; the things he was accused of were known about by many people within the company,” said Jones. “It was clear the decision was made to take him down rather than an organic investigation that uncovered wrongdoing.” The French investigation, in contrast, offers more compelling evidence of old-fashioned financial fraud, and “until he is brave enough to go to court and answer those charges, he certainly can’t dismiss the label of villain”, said Jones. In the meantime, Ghosn lives a free man in Beirut, the international arrest warrants remain unfulfilled, and the parsing of who Ghosn is, what he did and what he deserves carries on.
Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn is available on Apple TV+ on 25 August
