Just before New Year’s Eve, Ghosn, the ousted leader of Nissan Motor and Renault, completed a daring escape from Tokyo, where he was facing criminal charges that could have put him in prison for more than a decade. Despite being under intense surveil­lance while out on bail, with a camera trained on his front door and undercover agents tailing him when he left his house, Ghosn somehow made it to Lebanon, where he lived for most of his adolescence and is a citizen.

For Ghosn, who had spent more than 100 days in solitary confinement in a Tokyo jail and was contemplating trial in a country where prosecutors almost never lose, it was a stunning coup. Lebanon has a policy against extraditing its citizens, and as one of the most successful members of the country’s diaspora, he is a national hero, with friends who include some of the biggest names in local business and politics. His face is on a postage stamp.

Safely in Beirut, he could finally attempt to rebut the allegations against him, which he argues were the result of a conspiracy between nationalist factions, both within Nissan and the Japanese government, that were determined to take him out of play. And, most important for someone who spent the better part of two decades building and cultivating his public image, he could set to work restoring his reputation as a great man of business, maybe even preparing a comeback.

A few weeks after Ghosn’s escape, it’s not clear he will be successful. While he is, for the foreseeable future, beyond the reach of Japanese law enforcement, his legal problems are nowhere near being resolved. Ghosn is still under investigation in France, where Renault is based, while the government of Japan has issued a so-called Red Notice in his name through Interpol, exposing him to pos­sible arrest the moment he enters a country less hospitable than Lebanon.

Family of Greg Kelly, Ghosn’s co-accused, petition for his release

Gathered with his family in the country of his youth, Ghosn has undoubtedly upgraded his personal circum­stances. What remains to be seen, though, is whether he has simply traded one form of confinement for another.

While out on bail, Ghosn spent much of his time at his lawyers’ office in central Tokyo, in an anonymous mid-rise building near the Imperial Palace. Forbidden under the terms of his release from accessing the internet anywhere else, he had been given the use of a cramped meeting room with a bare table, whiteboard and a laptop. It was also the sole location from which Ghosn was allowed to call Carole, and even then only with the approval of a judge. From April, when he had last seen her, to the end of the year, he received this permission twice: once in November, and again, for one hour, on Christmas Eve.

Being unable to see his wife was the hardest part of his ordeal, Ghosn would say later, an absence that “put me on my knees”. His mood only darkened on Christmas Day, after a pretrial hearing during which he learned that prosecutors wanted to delay the second of his two trials until 2021. In all, his lawyers told him, it might take five years to fully resolve his cases.

Ghosn was indicted four times, all for financial mis­con­duct. The first two charges accuse him of under-report­ing his compensation in official filings, leaving out tens of millions of dollars that investi­gators say he intended eventually to receive. In the third and fourth indict­ments, for breach of trust, prose­cu­tors accused him of im­prop­erly benefiting from Nissan’s rela­tion­ships with partners in the Arab world, and in one case of diverting US$5 million of company money to his own ends via a car dealer group in Oman.

Ghosn has denied wrongdoing, argu­ing that the compensation prosecutors claim was misreported, was hypothetical only, and that he never misused Nissan funds. (He also settled a civil complaint from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which claimed he failed to adequately disclose his compensation, agreeing to a US$1 million penalty without admitting the agency’s allegations.)

Most criminal defendants, in Japan or elsewhere, do not have the option to simply exit their proceedings if they believe they cannot win. Ghosn – with ample financial resources and passports from Lebanon, France and Brazil – did. For months, a team of more than a dozen security operatives, led by a US Army Special Forces veteran, had been designing a plan to get him to Lebanon, the country where Ghosn has the most extensive connections. Secrecy was intense: some of the participants, according to a person familiar with the operation, did not know the identity of the person they were going to extract, even after they had accepted the job.

The team’s leader had a career that could not have been more different from Ghosn’s. Born in Staten Island, New York, Michael Taylor joined the US Army after high school and was accepted into the Green Berets, accumulating skills that included HALO jumps: the delicate art of leaping from a plane at 30,000 feet or more and free-falling as long as possible before opening the parachute.

He was deployed to Lebanon during the country’s brutal, 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990, and there met his future wife, Lamia – like Ghosn, a member of the country’s Maronite Christian minority. After leaving the army, Taylor put his skills to work in the private sector, setting up a Boston-area com­pany, American International Security Corp (AISC), that protected executives in dangerous places, prepared vulnerability assessments for critical infrastructure, and even planned operations to rescue kidnap victims.

He also collaborated with agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administra­tion and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, on one occasion working undercover to investigate Lebanese drug traffickers, and developed a relationship with Duane Clarridge, a legendary CIA officer who oversaw a private espionage network in his retirement.

Taylor, 59, had a habit of operating in grey areas. In the 1990s he was indicted in Massachusetts on charges inclu­ding illegal wiretapping and pleaded guilty to mis­demean­our offences. Later, The New York Times reported that he was connected to an “off-the-books” espionage network in Afghanistan, which was operating in apparent defiance of military rules against using private contractors as spies. (Taylor was not accused of wrongdoing.) And in 2012 federal prosecutors charged him with bribing an army officer to win US$54 million in contracts and conspiring with an FBI agent in an attempt to kill an investigation into the matter. Taylor pleaded guilty to wire fraud and violating federal procurement law and was sentenced to two years in prison. AISC’s business collapsed.

It’s not clear how Taylor was connected to Ghosn, although Lebanon is small enough that there would be only a couple of degrees of separation between their extended families. Even for Taylor, getting the executive out of Japan would be an extreme assignment. After almost 20 years at the top of one of Japan’s largest companies, Ghosn was perhaps the best-known foreigner in Tokyo, hardly some­one who could slip onto an aeroplane or ship without being noticed. And he wasn’t a hostage of a militant group or an abducted child; he was a criminal defendant, under prose­cu­tion by the government of a bedrock US ally.

Taylor and everyone he hired might face charges if their identities were discovered, at the very least restricting their future travel and employment, and at worst landing them in prison. The security contractor who was approached about an operation in Japan said he would never accept an assign­ment as peril­ous as the Ghosn job; those who might, he said, would need extremely generous compensation for the risks involved, perhaps pushing the total cost to US$15 million or more.

Yet according to the person familiar with the operation, Taylor was eager to help, and not only because of the poten­tial payoff. Despite their drastically different backgrounds, Taylor sympathised with Ghosn, the person said. Taylor had been denied bail in the run-up to his own trial, confined to Utah jails half a country away from his home in Massachusetts. In Ghosn he saw someone in a similar situation, a man he felt had been treated unfairly. Whether Ghosn was guilty seemed beside the point.

On the ground in Japan, Taylor would be assisted by an old friend from Lebanon, George-Antoine Zayek. A gemo­logist by training, Zayek had joined a Christian militia during the civil war, sustaining a severe leg wound during the fighting. Doctors in Beirut wanted to amputate; instead, Taylor helped arrange for more sophisticated treatment in Boston. Zayek kept his leg, but acquired a limp – and a lifelong loyalty to Taylor. He became a US citizen and was involved with Taylor’s companies in the 1990s, later working for him in Iraq. Taylor declined to comment on Ghosn’s escape; Zayek could not be reached for comment.

The final phase of the Ghosn operation began just before Christmas. On December 24, a company called Al Nitaq Al Akhdhar was billed US$175,000 by MNG Jet, a Turkish aviation group, for chartering a Bombardier Global Express jet, which has a range of more than 11,000km. If anyone from MNG had tried to visit this client, they would have found it difficult: there’s no company called Al Nitaq Al Akhdhar at the Dubai address it provided on the charter paperwork. Around the same time, MNG has said, a different client arranged to hire another plane, a shorter-range Bombardier, to fly from Istanbul to Beirut.

On the morning of Sunday, December 29, Taylor and Zayek landed at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, on the chartered Global Express. On board were also two pilots and, according to people familiar with the flight who asked not to be identified, a couple of large black cases of the kind concert roadies use to hold audio gear.

Later the same day, according to surveillance camera footage reported on by Japanese media, Ghosn left his residence, a rented house in the busy Roppongi neighbourhood. He wore a hat and a face mask. Taylor’s advance team had chosen Ghosn’s next destination carefully. During the months its members spent observing the plain-clothes agents following Ghosn around Tokyo, they had noticed something, according to the person familiar with the oper­ation. For some reason, the Japanese operatives typically did not follow their target when he entered a hotel.

Ghosn soon arrived at the nearby Grand Hyatt Tokyo, which is attached to Roppongi Hills, a giant mall and office complex with a confusing array of entrances and exits on different floors. From there, according to Japanese media, he made his way to Shinagawa station, a major rail hub, and onto a high-speed train to Osaka. Ghosn’s presence on public transport would not, in itself, have been suspicious. Under the terms of his bail he was permitted to travel domestically, and he had previously visited Kyoto, which is on the same bullet-train line, with one of his daughters.

Like everything else about Ghosn’s escape, the means of departure from Japan had been chosen with utmost care, with Taylor’s team evaluating a wide range of scenarios. Using a fake passport to get Ghosn onto a private jet as a passenger was a gamble: Japanese entry stamps contain QR codes, which if scanned would quickly reveal the subter­fuge. Another option, spiriting Ghosn onto a cargo vessel that would be bought for the operation, was eventually rejected as too complicated.

As part of their reconnaissance, Taylor’s people had surveyed airports all over the country, looking for terminals where security was lax. A few months ago, the person familiar with the operation said, the team observed that the X-ray machines in Kansai’s private terminal were much too small to scan a large box – and oversized items were simply waved through.

The routine was the same on the night of December 29. Airport officials did not examine the large black cases that Taylor and Zayek had with them, and they were loaded onto the Bombardier without incident. The plane was bound for Istanbul; filing a flight plan listing Lebanon as the destination would have raised too many red flags, according to a person familiar with the subsequent investigation. A little after 11pm, the jet was in the air.

Japan wants Britain to extradite suspects, as Ghosn alleges unfair treatment

It landed at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport about 12 hours later. An MNG operations manager named Okan Kosemen, who had helped arrange the charter, was waiting to greet it. In subsequent statements to a Turkish judge, Kosemen recounted that when he came on board, two Americans – presumably Taylor and Zayek – led him to the rear of the cabin. There, waiting in the bathroom cubicle, was Ghosn.

Kosemen waited for the crew to leave, shooed away a technician who wanted to work on the aircraft, and bundled Ghosn into a Ford van to take him to the second plane and to Lebanon. (Kosemen says he did not know he was aiding a fugitive when he arranged the charter and that one of the people involved threatened to harm his family if he did not cooperate. MNG also said it had no knowledge Ghosn would be on the flights.)

Ghosn’s passports had been taken as a condition of his bail – with one exception. He had two French passports, a privilege granted to citizens with particularly demanding travel schedules. He’d received permission to keep the second one; Japanese law requires foreigners to carry their identity documents at all times. The caveat was that it had to be kept in a plastic case, sealed with a lock to which only his lawyers had the combination. But Ghosn got it open and later presented it to an inspector at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport like any other traveller. It was the first legal act he had performed since leaving Japan.

For the first few days after Ghosn’s departure, official Japan seemed unsure how to react. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his deputies made no official state­ments; at the Ministry of Justice and the Tokyo prosecutor’s office, journalists struggled to get a comment from a spokes­person. The near-silence briefly fuelled theories that Ghosn might even have had a subtle green light for his escape – that elements within the government had grown tired of the public-relations headache of prosecuting such a high-profile defendant and decided it would be better to be rid of him.

Those theories were soon discarded. On January 7, prosecutors said they had obtained an arrest warrant for Carole, citing what they claimed were false statements she made more than eight months earlier. Ghosn’s representa­tives viewed the move, which was soon followed by a report that Japan would seek a Red Notice for her, as a clear attempt to intimidate him before his first public appear­ance since his escape.

That was planned for January 8 in Beirut, in the offices of the national journalists’ association, and billed by Ghosn as a chance for him to expose the “injustice and political persecution” behind his predica­ment. As the appointed time approached, Japanese camera crews thronged the pavement outside the venue; most had been denied accreditation to attend, a decision Ghosn said was motivated by what he viewed as unfair treatment by the Tokyo press.

Shielded by bodyguards, he entered the room just before 3pm. His hair, previously jet black, was wispy and grey, and deep lines marked his face. But otherwise he was unmistak­ably Ghosn: confident, unflappable, and in total command of his material.

His address lasted more than an hour, illus­trated with documents projected onto the wall behind him. Ghosn argued that the allegations against him had effective­ly been cooked up, the result of a conspiracy to halt his plans to more closely integrate Nissan with its partner Renault. The plot’s organisers, he said, included Hiroto Saikawa, his successor as Nissan chief executive, Hitoshi Kawaguchi, who was in charge of government relations, and board member Masakazu Toyoda. All have rejected his claims.

Only two topics were off-limits: the particulars of his escape, to protect the people who helped him, and the identities of Japanese officials he believes participated in the conspiracy – a concession, according to a person familiar with Ghosn’s planning, to concerns within the Lebanese government about complicating relations with Japan more than he already had.

“I am here to clear my name. These allegations are untrue, and I should have never been arrested,” he said. “I was presumed guilty before the eyes of the world and subject to a system whose only objective is to coerce confessions, secure guilty pleas, without regard to the truth.” His escape, he said, was “a risk one only takes if resigned to the impossibility of a fair trial”.

But as Ghosn’s speech went on, entropy took hold. He jumped rapidly from allegation to allegation at a pace that was difficult to follow even for observers versed in the latest Ghosniana. At one point he committed the No 1 faux pas for foreigners in Japan, comparing his arrest to the attack on Pearl Harbour. There were flashes of arrogance, with Ghosn describing Nissan as “in the dirt” before he arrived and boasting that “20 books of management were written about me”.

He devoted significant time to a relatively minor issue – whether his comped use of a room at Versailles for his 2016 wedding constituted a kickback for Renault’s sponsor­ship of the palace – providing a convoluted explanation that he later summed up with, “If I had thought there had been an ethical problem, I wouldn’t have done it.” He then spent more than an hour gamely answering questions, switching between English, French, Arabic and, out of deference to a small but enthusiastic crew of Brazilian reporters, Portuguese. He may not have exactly been having fun, but he clearly felt liberated.

That feeling will not last if his former captors have any­thing to say about it. The Red Notice initiated by Japan has triggered a legal proceeding in Lebanon, and the day after his press conference Ghosn was summoned by the Ministry of Justice. Prosecutors questioned him on the Japanese allegations and a separate issue: whether he commit­ted a crime by visiting Israel as head of Renault.

Lebanon consi­ders Israel an enemy, and it is illegal for citizens to travel there, with violations punishable by jail – a reminder that Ghosn’s globalist values may not be fully compatible with those of his new home. And it will, for now, be his home: the government has formally barred him from leaving, taking possession of his French passport. In an interview in Beirut, Justice Minister Albert Sarhan insisted that Lebanon will carefully consider any requests from Japan and that it is too early to say Ghosn will not be extradited. But given the political and legal context, that outcome is unlikely.

Ghosn says he is eager to clear his name, something his lawyer has suggested could occur through a trial in Lebanon – a country that ranked 138th in the most recent Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International. At his press conference, Ghosn was more expansive, saying he would welcome being judged “any­where where I think I can have a fair trial”. It is a reminder that for all he has lost, he still has plenty.

Among the remark­able things about Ghosn’s situation in Japan, where he stood a real chance of becoming one of the few corporate leaders of his stature to be sent to prison, was the degree to which all his advantages – connections, money, access to the global media – seemed to count for nothing. That turned out to be only half right. Ghosn may not have been able to beat the system, but he did not need to. He had the resources to go around it.

Text: Bloomberg BusinessWeek