American Greg Kelly, former collaborator of Carlos Ghosn at Nissan, received a six-month suspended prison sentence on Thursday for financial embezzlement at the end of his trial in Tokyo, the court announced.
Prosecutors had requested two years in prison once morest Mr. Kelly, who found himself on the front line in this trial following Mr. Ghosn fled to Lebanon at the end of 2019 to escape Japanese justice. Mr. Kelly had pleaded not guilty.
Nissan, also tried in this trial as a legal entity and which had pleaded guilty for its part, obtained a symbolic fine of 200 million yen (1.59 million francs), in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution.
Expected verdict
The outcome of this trial, which began almost a year and a half ago, was particularly awaited in Japan and abroad, because it was the first criminal judgment on part of the merits of the sprawling Ghosn affair. It had 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, a former head of legal affairs at Nissan, now 65, was arrested on the same day as Mr. Ghosn and on the same initial charge: failing to report to Japanese stock market authorities the compensation that the Franco-Lebanese-Brazilian was later to collect from Nissan.
The prosecutors accused him of having helped Mr. Ghosn to conceal from the Japanese stock market authorities 9.1 billion yen (some 72 million francs) of remuneration over the period 2010-2018 that Nissan planned to pay him later.
Call
Mr. Kelly and his lawyers had however argued that neither the amounts, nor the means of payment nor the schedule of these payments were engraved in stone, and that therefore Nissan had no need to publish this information.
He spent a month in pre-trial detention following his arrest in Japan at the end of 2018, and has since lived on bail with a ban on leaving Japanese territory pending the outcome of his trial.
His lawyers had assured in advance of the verdict that he would appeal in the event of a conviction, even to a suspended sentence.
/ ATS
