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Beirut: French judges on Monday heard in Beirut a witness as part of an investigation by the Nanterre Prosecutor into the former head of the Renault-Nissan alliance Carlos Ghosn, who has been residing in Lebanon since his controversial escape from Tokyo, an informed judicial source told AFP.
Two investigations target the former auto tycoon, the first in Paris and related to a consultancy contract concluded by the Dutch branch of the Renault-Nissan alliance with former Minister of Justice Rashida Dati and crime researcher Alain Boyer, and the second in Nanterre and related to the misuse of alliance funds and money laundering.
witnesses
A Lebanese judicial source revealed to AFP that the French judges “heard, during a session held in the public hall of the Court of Cassation in the Palace of Justice, one of the witnesses, in the presence and escort of the discriminatory attorney general, Judge Imad Qabalan, and the attorney general, Judge Mirna Kallas.”
The delegation, which arrived in Beirut on Sunday night and left on Thursday, is scheduled to hear another witness on Tuesday. The judicial source refrained from identifying the two witnesses, saying only that they had a “commercial character.”
According to the source, the French delegation asked “questions related to the interrogation that Ghosn underwent in Beirut last summer, regarding financial transfers made by the latter while he was chairman of the board of directors” of the Nissan-Renault alliance.
researches
French judges are working, according to the same source, to “collect information to determine whether Ghosn’s transfers involve embezzlement of funds from company accounts and corruption.”
In an interview with the French newspaper “Le Parisien” on February 12, Ghosn said, “They did not find a single financial transfer from Renault or Nissan that owes me.”
A French delegation, which included investigative judges from Nanterre and Paris and investigators from the Central Office for Combating Corruption and Financial and Tax Violations in France, last summer listened for five days to Ghosn in Beirut as a witness, regarding two parties he held at Versailles Palace, and payments to a commercial distributor in the Sultanate of Oman. At the time, his lawyers described the hearings as a “fair” procedure and said it was an “opportunity to explain his position.”
On the eve of the arrival of the French delegation to Beirut, a well-informed source in Nanterre told AFP that the French judiciary may ask the Lebanese public prosecutor to “report the charges” to Ghosn – the equivalent of being charged in France – or even issue an arrest warrant once morest him.
According to the Lebanese source, France is trying “to create a file and evidence in which to pursue Ghosn, but this matter is not available yet.”
The former businessman, who holds Lebanese, French and Brazilian nationalities, is targeted by an international arrest warrant issued by Interpol. He has been in Lebanon since his controversial escape from Japan in December 2019.
Ghosn was arrested in November 2018 on the tarmac of Tokyo airport and held for several months, then released on bail and prevented from leaving the archipelago, pending trial on suspicion of embezzling funds from Nissan.
He later succeeded in circumventing the surveillance of the Japanese authorities, and he is suspected of hiding inside a large black box that resembles the boxes used to transport musical instruments and was transferred in a private plane through Osaka Airport to Ataturk Airport in Istanbul and from there to Beirut Airport.
Ghosn has repeatedly stressed that he “did not flee from justice”, but rather wanted to “escape injustice”, denouncing a “conspiracy” organized by the Japanese authorities once morest him.
