The Weekly Wrap for Saturday, 24 November 2018

Follow us on Twitter, or click here to subscribe to The Weekly Wrap. Talking points . PHOTO: Gregory Bull / AP US officials moved to curtail the rights of stateside immigrants amid a heightened focus on border security A suicide bomber killed 50 and wounded 80 in a Kabul wedding hall Volatility in the US tech sector rattled global markets Italy's budget was again rejected by an increasingly-concerned EU A racism row forced Dolce & Gabbana to cancel shows in China Donald Trump gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman a pass over the gruesome slaying of Jamal Khashoggi Democrats vowed to investigate Ivanka Trump's informal email account Carbon dioxide records reached a new 250-year high in 2018 America's worst serial killer confessed to 90 murders A photo of Xi Jinping and Rodrigo Duterte stirred debate over colonisation in the Philippines Deep Dive The man who saved Nissan. PHOTO: NBC The sheen is coming off Japan's vaunted corporate culture. Recalls, falsification scandals and now the fall of a corporate titan. Two decades ago Carlos Ghosn arrived in Japan with a mission to save Nissan Motors. He did, and the outsider became an icon. Last week Ghosn was one of the most respectable executives in the global automative industry. Today he's sitting in a Tokyo jail cell, awaiting prosecution for gross financial misconduct. The man and the myth Towards the end of Japan's lost decade Nissan was in ill health; saddled with high debt and mounting losses. The middling European car manufacturer Renault took a punt on Nissan and negotiated an alliance. In 1999 a Franco-Brazilian named Carlos Ghosn took over as Nissan's COO. He was just the fourth foreigner to run a Japanese automaker. With his brash style, intense intelligence and confidence, Ghosn would have cut a bold figure in most executive circles. In Japan he was singular. Here was a swaggering gaijin who lorded over press conferences, a man who would soon challenge the most cherished precepts of doing business in Japan. The larger-than-life persona belied a professional demeanour that was both exacting and regimented. Ghosn drew on an unbelievably wide set of experiences, having spent 18 years of his life rising from the factory floor of a Michelin plant to become the CEO of the tire-maker's North American operations. He spoke five languages and understood how to swing the axe better than most. It'll come as no surprise that he was one of the most respected leaders of the business world, alongside others like Jack Welch, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Innovator and iconoclast  Under Ghosn’s aegis a focus on continuous improvements and ruthless cost-cutting halted Nissan's slide into obscurity. Within three years 21,000 employees had lost their jobs, a full 14% of the workforce. But mere cost-cutting wouldn’t be enough. Ghosn had to do something else as well - to smash apart Nissan's corporate culture and start all over again. The 'salary man' mindset of lifetime service, and age-based promotions, was scrapped. Performance now superseded loyalty. It was a revolutionary, polarising move; Ghosn was challenging the very artifice of Japanese social structures. He also struck at Nissan's keiretsu, the informal business group of suppliers with interlocking interests and holdings. Such models were the living remnants of Imperial Japan's sprawling zaibatsu conglomerates. Ghosn challenged it all. In turning Nissan around he changed how Japan does business.   Nissan grew and kept on growing. His first three-year plan returned Nissan to profitability. The next one saw Nissan reduce its debt to 0 and become one of the most profitable carmakers in Japan. By 2005 he was CEO of both Renault and Nissan - the first person to helm two Fortune 500 companies simultaneously. Ghosn didn't stop there, going on to add Misubishi Motors to his alliance. Today Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi is the fourth-largest auto group in the world. The fall On 19th of November Ghosn's private jet landed in Tokyo ahead of a board meeting. The police were waiting on the runway. An internal investigation at Nissan had turned up evidence of serious impropriety. Ghosn was arrested alongside his confidante and right-hand man Greg Kelly. An unidentified member of the company's legal team had shared incriminating evidence with the police. That very afternoon he was stood down from the company. The details are still coming to light but what is known so far is that Ghosn had used a subsidiary company in the Netherlands as his personal slush fund. $18m worth of luxury mansions and apartments were bought in Paris, Amsterdam, Beirut and Rio de Janeiro. His family vacationed on company money. And there's also the matter of $44m in pay that he failed to report to Renault.  Ghosn awaits his fate alone, but will no doubt be buoyed by the fact that senior corporate executives rarely have to endure meaningful time in jail. The rest of us will have to wait and see whether the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance collapses under the weight of the scandal. Worldlywise Sandberg and Schrage. PHOTO: James Lawler Duggan / Reuters Offensiveness is the best defence Spreading Russian disinformation to millions of Americans. The Cambridge Analytica scandal. Privacy breaches. Keeping track of all the rolling, multiplying controversies at Facebook is no mean feat. The company is beset by critics on all sides: lawmakers, investors, regulators and users. So much so that earlier in the year CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a gathering of senior staff that Facebook would be moving to a ‘war footing’. It turned out to be a dirty war. Last week an explosive report alleged that Facebook hired Definers, an opposition research company, to go on the attack. The Republican-aligned consultancy’s work was to muddy the waters and dilute negative perceptions about Facebook's responsibility in the scandals. Gallingly, Definers threw a spanner into the mix: Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros. The corporate attack dog issued claims that Facebook critics were funded and controlled by Soros. By now our readers know that Soros already looms large in the minds of anti-Semites and reactionaries; a totem of corrupting wealth and vaguely socialist leanings. Weaponising this sentiment could, Definers hoped, change the narrative around Facebook. In light of the revelations Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg fired off a salvo of denials and equivocations. But the rearguard action collapsed on Wednesday when the outgoing communications chief Elliot Schrage confirmed the allegations. His admission was published on Facebook's blog at 5pm on Thanksgiving Eve, a time when most Americans are distracted: leaving work to head home for the holiday. The only problem is that cunning and tactical mea culpas are rarely convincing ones.  A half-term, but a full-plate. PHOTO: AFP Interpolitics  Hollywood films have a tendency to characterise Interpol as some globe-bestriding crack force that swoops on terrorists and criminals alike. In reality it is a Lyon-based umbrella bureaucracy that facilitates intelligence sharing between the police forces of its 194-member states. And, like any international organisation it is riven by factionalism; who's inside the tent and who's out. In recent years Russia and China have tried clambering inside the tent. Some members (read: America and select western European countries) were aghast when Meng Hongwei, a former member of China’s security apparatus, was elected to the largely ceremonial Interpol presidency in 2016. Yet his tenure was cut short earlier this year when he was arrested on a trip back to his home country (you know the drill: real or imagined corruption charges). Interpol went back to the polls this week to fill the unexpected vacancy. Russia proffered one Alexander Prokopchuk. The inner sanctum balked, lobbying hard against the former KGB officer and Interior Ministry general. Their efforts worked: veteran South Korean policeman Kim Jong-yang won out. The Best Of Times... Finally, some good news. PHOTO: NASA Happy birthday This week marks 20 years since a Proton rocket carried into space the first module of the International Space Station. For two decades the giant airtight contraption has orbited the earth (at 27,000km). Over time it's been improved and extended. Every night as we sleep, above us whizzes a high-tech laboratory - a symbol of international cooperation. That Russia, America and 14 other nations could build such a thing is a feat; that they've maintained it during periods of great terrestrial hostility is simply astounding. Those of us down here should be reminded on occasion that we are already an interplanetary species. Fish fuel How will we run the ships of the future? Fish, of course. Before your mind races away with images of entire schools of fish lassoed together, stop. We're referring to dead fish. The Norwegian cruise ship firm Hurtigruten has announced plans to use liquefied biogas (LGB) to power its fleet. LGB is a renewable gas extracted from dead fish and other organic material. It is the most environmentally friendly fuel source in operation and a wonderful way to get rid of your vegetable offcuts and fish bones. Incredible thinking. The Worst Of Times... A Sentinelse man fires a bow at an Indian coast guard helicopter. PHOTO: AFP The Thanksgiving Story, revisited The urge to convert remote tribes to Christianity might seem anachronistic (let alone weird) in 2018. Not to John Allen Chau. The 27-year-old American - a self-fashioned missionary - was killed this week after contacting the fiercely independent peoples of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. It is illegal under Indian law to make contact with the Sentinelese, as their isolation has makes them susceptible to foreign diseases. Nevertheless, Chau hired fishermen to drop him off at the island, made contact with the Sentinelese and was killed for it. We only hope that he didn't pass on any illnesses before he expired. Or blankets.  No Jonah, just trash A sperm whale beached in Indonesia has highlighted the level of plastic pollution entering our oceans. Six kilograms worth of human rubbish was pulled from the creatures stomach, including 103 plastic cups and bags, plastic sandals, tarpaulins and ropes. If it the sight of fishermen pulling footwear from the stomach of a gutted whale makes you feel queasy, imagine the micro-plastics inside your line-caught salmon fillet. Please stop using disposable plastics.  Weekend Reading Quote of the week "Anybody who does business in China compromises some of their core values. Every single company, because the laws in China are quite a bit different than they are in our own country." - Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy grapples with Google's plans for a compromised Chinese search engine. Headline of the week 'Trump confuses climate change with weather, prompting widespread despair' - The Independent Featured long-reads from inkl publishers: Businessweek remembers Tesla's forgotten factory Foreign Policy inspects Kenya's refugee camps The Economist counts the cost of a no-deal Brexit If you don't have an inkl membership as yet, please get one now. It'll unlock all the stories linked in this issue and 150,000 more each month. You can get 30 days of real and trusted news, wrapped up in one of the world's best news apps, for just 99 cents.   Tom Wharton @trwinwriting   P.S. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter (and to subscribe, if this issue of The Weekly Wrap was forwarded to you).