Pfirst criminal conviction in the Carlos Ghosn case. Greg Kelly was given a six-month suspended prison sentence after his trial for financial embezzlement on Thursday March 3 in Tokyo. This sentence is much lighter than the two years in prison demanded by the prosecutors against Mr. Kelly, who will appeal his conviction. This 65-year-old American lawyer, former head of legal affairs at Nissan, became the main defendant in this trial by default after Carlos Ghosn fled to Lebanon at the end of 2019.
He had pleaded not guilty, while Nissan, also tried in this trial as a legal person, had admitted his guilt. The Japanese car manufacturer was fined 200 million yen (1.6 million euros), in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution. The Ghosn affair started in Japan with the sensational arrest in November 2018 of the big boss of the Renault-Nissan alliance, released on bail the following year.
Greg Kelly had been arrested the same day as Mr. Ghosn and for the same initial charge: having failed to declare for years to the Japanese stock market authorities the remuneration that the Franco-Lebanese-Brazilian was to receive later from Nissan. Prosecutors accused him of having helped Carlos Ghosn to conceal from the Japanese stock market authorities 9.1 billion yen (some 70 million euros) in deferred compensation over the period 2010-2018.
A year and a half of hearings
The court found Greg Kelly guilty for these facts, but only for the 2017/2018 financial year, considering that he was not previously aware of the “conspiracies” of Carlos Ghosn and another Nissan official at the time, Toshiaki Ohnuma, on these deferred payments. The latter was not prosecuted by the Japanese courts, having benefited from whistleblower status. In a statement released Thursday, Greg Kelly said he was “extremely surprised and shocked” by his conviction, repeating that he had “absolutely not taken part in illegal activities”. His lawyers said they would appeal.
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During his trial, the hearings of which spanned almost a year and a half, his defense argued that neither the amounts nor the timing of these payments were set in stone, and that therefore Nissan had no need to publish this information. Nissan was looking for a “legal way” to keep Carlos Ghosn after his retirement, to prevent him from joining a competing group, had again assured Greg Kelly. After spending a month in pre-trial detention following his arrest in Japan, Mr. Kelly has since been living on bail with a ban on leaving Japanese territory pending the end of his trial.
“Three long years”
“We are relieved that the legal procedure has come to an end, and that the Kelly spouses can return home” in Tennessee (southern United States), reacted Thursday in a press release the American ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, who was following this case closely. “It has been three long years for the Kelly family, but this chapter has come to an end,” added the ambassador soberly.
“Kelly had been arrested in the hope that he would turn around and testify against Ghosn”, but after the latter escaped, prosecutors had found themselves “with a weak and limited case against Kelly”, according to Stephen Givens, a business lawyer in Tokyo interviewed by AFP ahead of the verdict. The Japanese judges faced a “dilemma”, because an acquittal would have been “humiliating” for the prosecutors and for Nissan, the lawyer had further estimated.
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The deferred compensation component was only to be the hors d’oeuvre of the Carlos Ghosn trials in Japan. Because the Japanese justice also wanted to judge the former boss for charges of breach of trust, which this time only targeted him. The deposed car tycoon remains involved in two French legal proceedings, for consulting service contracts entered into by RNBV, the Dutch subsidiary of Renault-Nissan, and for misuse of corporate assets and money laundering. Carlos Ghosn, who claims his innocence all along the line, is the subject of an arrest warrant from Interpol at the request of Japan, but Lebanon does not extradite its nationals.