On December 30, 2019, Carlos Ghosn became the most famous fugitive on the planet when the former chairman of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance fled to Lebanon from house arrest in Japan.
This political-judicial thriller describes in detail for the first time how Ghosn was arrested on arrival at Haneda Airport in Tokyo a year earlier and incarcerated for 130 days.
Long revered in Japan for saving Nissan from bankruptcy in 1999 and helping Renault achieve the best results in its history, Ghosn explains being transformed overnight into a pariah, torn from the world and his family as the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the Nissan Old Guard and the Tokyo Public Prosecutors' Office.
Ghosn also recounts how he built the Franco-Japanese Alliance into a global motor giant, expanding operations in markets from the United States, China and Russia to Brazil, Morocco and Thailand, becoming the world's top automaker by volume in 2017. But his arrest on November 9, 2018 plunges the alliance into crisis as company share prices collapse at the same time as the global auto industry faces an unprecedented technological revolution.
Broken Alliances involves the highest levels of political power in Japan and France and describes a Japanese judicial system closer to that of the Soviet Union under Stalin than an advanced democracy. It also addresses the reasons behind Nissan's internal coup and questions about the chairman's remuneration, his management methods and his vision for the future of the auto industry - to understand what has happened and what could still happen tomorrow.
Carlos Ghosn is the former chairman and chief executive of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance. He also served as chairman and chief executive at Renault (2005-19) and chairman at Nissan and Mitsubishi (until 2018). Known for orchestrating the remarkable turnaround of Nissan from near bankruptcy in 1999, Ghosn later became the auto industry's longest-serving chief executive and the first to run two Fortune Global 500 companies simultaneously.
Philippe Riès is a journalist who spent almost three decades at Agence France-Presse (AFP), the world's oldest news agency. He served as AFP's chief economics editor in Paris for six years before leaving in 2008 to become a founding member of Mediapart, the world's first online journal available exclusively by subscription. Ries has authored four books including Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival with Carlos Ghosn.
Peter Starr is a writer who has been based in the Mekong Delta in Cambodia since 2000. He has lived in Asia since 1986, working for 15 years as an editor, correspondent and consultant for AFP. Previously, he covered banking for the Australian Financial Review. Starr has authored three corporate histories of Citigroup and translated The Asian Storm: Asia's Economic Crisis Examined by Philippe Riès.
