B6| Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
EXCHANGE
identified himself as a distant
cousin. The bodyguards backed off.
“Welcome to Lebanon,” the man
said, explaining to Mr. Ghosn that
they were connected by marriage
through a distant relative.
Where was that relative now? Mr.
Ghosn asked. The man pointed to an
apartment building across the street
from Mr. Ghosn’s childhood home.
Mr. Ghosn was born in Porto
Velho, Brazil, in the Amazon jun-
gle, to Lebanese parents.
His father, Georges Ghosn took
the family back to Lebanon when
Mr. Ghosn was 6 years old. Around
that time, Georges Ghosn was ar-
rested for his involvement in the
murder of a priest who was shot
twice, once in the head.
Police said Georges and the priest
had been smuggling diamonds and
foreign currency, Lebanon’s main
French language daily newspaper re-
ported at the time. Mr. Ghosn’s fa-
ther admitted to the trafficking but
maintained he didn’t pull the trigger
in the shooting, the paper said. His
sentence was commuted to 15 years
of hard labor after a court ruled the
killing wasn’t premeditated.
Georges got an early release
from jail, when Mr. Ghosn was 16
years old. Four months later he
was caught with about $35,000 in
counterfeit cash, the Lebanon pa-
per reported. He was sentenced to
three more years in prison.
Mr. Ghosn declined to comment
on his father. His father’s impris-
onment was a painful episode for
him, said one person who has spo-
ken to him about it. “It’s a credit
to him that he overcame it,” this
person said.
In a 2003 autobiography, Mr.
Ghosn described his father as a
devout Maronite who shuttled
between Brazil and Lebanon for
work. The book didn’t mentionhis imprisonment.
Mr. Ghosn wrote that Lebanon
in those days was “the Switzerland
of the Middle East,” a sun-kissed
financial center that drew tourists
from around the world.
His mother sent him to a pri-
vate Jesuit school, Notre Dame de
Jamhour, where he was a stellar
pupil with a rebellious streak.
Elie Gharios, a childhood friend,
said he and young Carlos once were
suspended for writing “down with
old people” in red paint on the side
of the 170-year-old school. The fu-
ture auto executive was often sur-
rounded by other boys who followed
his every order, Mr. Gharios recalled.
In 1971, Mr. Ghosn graduated
from high school and moved to
Paris to continue his education. It
was in France that peers started
using a Western pronunciation of
his name, with a hard “g” and a si-
lent “s” in a way that rhymes with
“cone.” In Arabic, the name sounds
more like “Ho-ssun.”
As Mr. Ghosn’s auto-industry ca-
reer took off, he seldom visited
Lebanon. His first major assign-
ment as a young manager at the
tire maker Michelin was in Brazil.
People who know him from that
period say he didn’t look back.
In 2008, he bought a large stake
in a vineyard in Lebanon. A fewyears later, after a 2012 divorce,
he married his second wife, Carole.
She came from the same Maronite
neighborhood in Beirut.
In 2012, Nissan purchased for Mr.
Ghosn’s use a villa in the city’s
Ashrafieh quarter, a neighborhood
of stately mansions and apartments
buildings that had given the city its
former moniker, the Paris of the
Middle East. Nissan paid about $9.
million, then sunk a further $7.6 mil-
lion into renovating it. Carole Ghosn
supervised the job, which included
painting the exterior pink and exca-
vating two ancient sarcophagi now
visible beneath a glass floor leading
to the wine cellar.
Mr. Ghosn’s arrest in November
2018 marked the start of a year-
long tug of war with the Japanese
justice system. After spending
months in prison, often in solitary
confinement, he was assigned to
live in a Tokyo apartment with
camera surveillance and a court
order barring contact with his
wife, then shuttling between Leba-
non and New York City.
Jumping bail and fleeing to Leba-
non reunited Mr. Ghosn with his
wife and gave him a measure of
freedom. Interpol issued a “red no-
tice,” indicating he was wanted by
Japan for extradition. But Lebanon
doesn’t extradite its citizens, which
means that Mr. Ghosn is unlikely to
return to face trial in Japan.
Tokyo’s deputy chief prosecu-
tor, Takahiro Saito, said in a writ-
ten statement that Mr. Ghosn
“didn’t want to submit to the
judgment of our nation’s courts
and sought to avoid the punish-
ment for his own crimes.”
Nissan had changed the locks at
the Beirut villa after his arrest, but
a Lebanese court ordered the com-
pany to hand the new keys over to
Carole Ghosn while the court re-
views the matter. Nissan is trying
to evict the Ghosns, and the
Ghosns are trying to buy the house
from the company.
After he stepped off a chartered
jet in Beirut on Dec. 30, Mr. Ghosn
began laying the groundwork for his
new life. He immediately visited
Lebanon’s president, who hadn’t
been warned of Mr. Ghosn’s escape
plans, according to people familiar
with the matter. His Lebanese law-
yer, who has extensive political con-
tacts in Beirut, dialed politicians
and newspaper editors to gauge
their support for Mr. Ghosn’s deci-
sion to take refuge in Lebanon.
Mr. Ghosn has been mounting
his legal and public-relations cam-
paign against Nissan and the Japa-
nese government with the zeal he
once brought to running Nissan-
Renault. Several times a week, he
takes a car to his Lebanese law-
yer’s office in central Beirut.
The firm has provided him with
a small, corner office overlooking
a school and a church. He uses a
videoconferencing room next door
to talk to his other lawyers and
public-relations advisers in Tokyo,
Paris and New York.
“I have to take care of myself,” he
said. “I don’t have to take care of all
these companies. I work with a more
restricted group of people. They’vebeen through a lot of battles, but
people I can really count on.”
He has filed a lawsuit against
Renault alleging the French car
maker owes him a €250,
($270,000) pension payment after
he stepped down as chairman and
chief executive while inside a To-
kyo jail. His lawyers have filed a
lawsuit in an Amsterdam court al-
leging that Nissan and Mitsubishi
unfairly dismissed him as a direc-
tor at the companies’ Dutch joint-
venture. Lawyers representing the
joint venture have said Mr. Ghosn’s
dismissal was justified.
“It’s an unbalanced fight,” he
said. “The companies have deep
pockets.”
Lebanese officials have asked Mr.
Ghosn to not say anything that
mightcreate tension between Beirut
and Tokyo. That meant toning down
his first public appearance since his
escape—a Jan. 8 news conference in
which he berated Nissan and the
Japanese justice system.
Mr. Ghosn had considered criti-
cizing the Japanese government
and accusing officials of conspir-
ing with Nissan in his downfall, ac-
cording to people familiar with the
matter. Nissan and Japanese pros-
ecutors have denied that they con-
spired to bring down Mr. Ghosn.
Prosecutors said they conducted
their own investigation.
On the eve of the news confer-
ence, Lebanese officials asked him
to refrain from attacking Japanese
officials, these people said. A
spokesperson for the Japanese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs said
that before the news conference,
Japan’s ambassador to Lebanon
had told Lebanon’s president that
Mr. Ghosn’s “illegal departure
from Japan and arrival in Lebanon
is deeply regrettable and can
never be overlooked by the gov-
ernment of Japan.”
Lebanese government officials
didn’t respond to requests to
comment.
In Lebanon, it is a crime for a
private citizen to harm Lebanon’s
relations with another country.
“I would do nothing beyond rea-
sonable to jeopardize the relation-
ship between the countries,” Mr.
Ghosn later said.
Mr. Ghosn also used the news
conference to try to quell a sepa-
rate controversy. A group of law-
yers had petitioned a Lebanese
court to arrest Mr. Ghosn for a
trip he made to Israel in 2008
when he was CEO of Renault. Leb-
anese citizens are barred from vis-
iting that country because the two
states are still technically at war.
Mr. Ghosn’s legal team coun-
tered the petition in court by say-
ing he made the visit as the head
of a French company and shouldn’t
face prosecution.
Addressing the TV cameras in
Arabic, Mr. Ghosn sounded a note
of contrition. “Of course I apolo-
gize for the visit, and I was very
moved that the Lebanese people
were affected by it,” he said. “The
last thing I wanted to do was hurt
the Lebanese people.”
—Nazih Osseiran
contributed to this article.Right: Mr. Ghosn in his scout
uniform in Lebanon in 1966.
Below, at center: Mr. Ghosn as a
student at the prestigious École
Polytechnique near Paris.Top: Carlos Ghosn met the media on Jan. 8 for the first time since he fled Japan. Above left: Lebanon has been rocked by protests demanding the
overthrow of the establishment. Above right: Mr. Ghosn and his wife, Carole Ghosn, at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.“For who? Nissan? Renault?”
Mr. Ghosn’s return to the home-
land he left as a teenager is a
strange twist of fate for an execu-
tive that has long considered him-
self a citizen of the world, accu-
mulating homes and passports on
multiple continents. All four of his
children grew up between Paris
and Tokyo before studying at Stan-
ford University. None of them
speak Arabic.
“Since I started to work, this is
the longest period I spent in Leba-
non,” Mr. Ghosn said.
Today, the country that once
put his face on a postage stamp is
buffeted by violent protests de-
manding the overthrow of the Leb-
anese establishment. “Carlos
Ghosn is one of them,” said Ahmad
Jammoul, a 21-year-old student
who marched in a recent protest.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Ghosn
responded that he “is not part of
the Lebanese establishment, has
no political role in the country and
does not plan to have any.”
The timing of his return hasn’t
helped. Mr. Ghosn mounted a costly
escape operation—chartering a pri-
vate jet to smuggle himself out of
Japan in an audio-equipment box,
and forfeiting close to $15 million in
bail money—while Lebanon was in
the middle of a financial crisis.
Lebanon’s borrowing costs soared
as investors fled its sovereign-debt
market. Banks, the main holders of
Lebanese bonds, have responded to
a cash crunch by restricting custom-
ers’ access to their money, including
the amounts that can be transferred
abroad. Mr. Ghosn is consulting Hol-
lywood agent Michael Ovitz about
selling his story for film and TV, and
has told friends it could help finance
his legal battle.
The latest protests started in Oc-
tober, after the government pro-
posed a tax on WhatsApp, the popu-
lar messaging app. They turned
violent as anger grew at the coun-
try’s political class, whom people
blame for the collapsing economy.
“This thinking that there is no so-
lution for the problems in Lebanon, I
don’t buy it,” Mr. Ghosn said. “There
is a solution. But the solution on pa-
per is maybe 5%, but then it’s 95%
execution. Same as companies.”
Walid Jumblatt, a lawmaker at
the center of Lebanese politics,
has called for Mr. Ghosn to be
named the country’s energy minis-
ter. Mr. Ghosn said he has no in-
terest and that he steers clear of
Lebanon’s sectarian politics.
For the first time in decades,
Mr. Ghosn has time on his hands.
He and his wife have been hosting
dinners for friends inside their
Beirut mansion. He has been re-
connecting with childhood class-
mates, visiting old haunts, skiing
and walking in the mountains. On
Tuesday, he and his wife heard the
Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra
play Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.
“I need to recover,” he said.
“Physically, the 14 months in
Japan have been a challenge.”
One afternoon last month, he
took his 25-year-old son, Anthony,
for the first time to visit the
apartment where he grew up. It is
in a working-class neighborhood
encircling the ruins of a fifth-cen-
tury church. A stronghold of the
Maronite Christian community, the
neighborhood has changed little
since he left.
A 64-year-old cafe owner tried
to approach Mr. Ghosn but was
stopped by his bodyguard. He
Continued from page B
Carlos Ghosn
Finds Exile
In Homeland
‘Since I started to work,
this is the longest period
I spent in Lebanon,’
Mr. Ghosn said.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HASAN SHAABAN/BLOOMBERG NEWS; FUTURE-IMAGE/ZUMA PRESS; HUSSEIN MALLA/ASSOCIATED PRESS