🚗 A man who legally cannot set foot in Japan is offering to run one of its biggest companies. Carlos Ghosn — the former Nissan boss who fled the country hidden in a box and has been a wanted fugitive ever since — says he's the only person who can save Nissan today. The wild part isn't that he said it. It's that some shareholders agree.

A proposal that couldn't possibly work

At Nissan's annual shareholders' meeting in Yokohama on Tuesday, June 23, CEO Ivan Espinosa stood before a room full of frustrated owners. The frustration has a basis: the stock is a fraction of what it was, sales have roughly halved, and turnaround plan after turnaround plan has come up short. Somewhere in that mood, at least one shareholder floated an idea that would be unthinkable at almost any other blue-chip company — bring Carlos Ghosn back to the board.

It went nowhere. Shareholders backed the company's own slate of directors, and the Ghosn revival died on the floor. But the fact that it was raised at all, out loud, at the annual meeting of the very company that accuses him of defrauding it, tells you how strange the mood at Nissan has become.

Then Ghosn himself picked up the phone.

From national hero to the man in the box

A quick recap, because the absurdity doesn't land without it.

In 1999, Nissan was close to bankruptcy. Renault took a stake and sent in Ghosn, who cut costs, closed plants, and dragged the company back to profit. Japan, not a country known for cheering foreign cost-cutters, turned him into a folk hero. He was nicknamed "7-Eleven" for the hours he kept. He even got his own manga.

Then it came apart. In November 2018 he was arrested in Tokyo, accused of under-reporting his pay and misusing company funds — charges he has always denied, casting himself as the victim of a boardroom plot and of Japan's "hostage justice" system. While out on bail and awaiting trial, in late December 2019, he climbed into a large case for audio equipment, was carried onto a private jet at Kansai airport, and flew to Beirut by way of Istanbul. He has been in Lebanon ever since.

That is the man some Nissan shareholders want back. And here is the detail that turns the whole thing into a dark comedy: Lebanon has no extradition treaty with Japan, there is an Interpol red notice out for him, and he would be arrested the moment he landed at a Japanese airport. A Nissan director who cannot attend a board meeting in Yokohama is, to put it gently, a logistical problem.

"If one profile can do it, it's mine"

None of this has dented his confidence. Speaking to Reuters from Beirut this week, Ghosn argued that the shareholders calling for him weren't being nostalgic — they were being rational. "It's a reaction with plenty of common sense," he said, adding that he could feel the anger and frustration of investors.

He pointed at Nissan's results and all but dared anyone to defend them. "Look at the facts. They are dismal," he said, citing a roughly 80% slide in the share price since 2018 and annual sales falling to about 3 million vehicles from more than 5 million. An advisory role, he added, wouldn't be enough; only a CEO has the power to act, and Nissan is in an "emergency" that demands hard decisions.

Then came the line that did the rounds. Asked who that decision-maker should be, he didn't hedge. The profile that could pull it off today, he said, is "mine." Not arrogance, he insisted, just the facts: he had done it once already. Without a change of course, he warned, Nissan risks ending up a minor affiliate of some larger company, most likely a Chinese one — a crisis worse than the one he was hired to fix in 1999, "but with less hope."

The diagnosis is fair. The doctor is unavailable.

The uncomfortable part for Nissan: chunks of Ghosn's diagnosis are hard to argue with. The decline is real, the share price genuinely cratered, and "we're drifting" is not a crazy reading of a company that keeps closing plants and cutting jobs.

The trouble is everything else. Start with the obvious — he is a fugitive who cannot enter the country. Then there is the strategy. Analysts have argued for years that Ghosn's own fixation on sales volume over profit is part of how Nissan got here: too many cars sold too cheaply, the brand worn thin. Espinosa is trying to do the opposite, squeezing more profit out of fewer cars. Rehiring the architect of the volume era to cure the volume era's hangover is a peculiar prescription.

The analysts aren't buying the romance either. "They just miss the glory times of Nissan," said Macquarie's James Hong of the shareholder push, adding that he wasn't sure it made economic sense or was even realistic, and that the industry has changed enormously since Ghosn's heyday.

Nissan, for its part, declined to engage. The company said it does not comment on "speculative remarks," noted it posted an operating profit last financial year, and said its turnaround is making steady progress with liquidity still strong.

What the shareholders were really saying

Read literally, the "bring back Ghosn" moment is a joke: a wanted man bidding for a job he cannot legally hold, at a company that accuses him of robbing it. Read as a signal, it is sharper — a flare sent up by owners who have watched their investment shrink for years and grabbed the most provocative name they could find, fugitive status and all. The real question isn't whether Ghosn returns (he can't). It's how bad things had to get before "rehire the guy who escaped in a box" started sounding, to some people, like a plan.

In Japan, a fallen executive is supposed to disappear quietly. Ghosn never got the memo. Would the captain who jumped ship — and can't legally sail back to port — ever get a second hearing where you live? Or are some kinds of damage simply final?

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