“I am a very good friend, but I can also become a great enemy. The story is not over. So says Michael Taylor, a former member of the American special forces, who orchestrated the spectacular escape of Carlos Ghosn in a musician’s trunk after his arrest in Tokyo in November 2018.
He is angry with the former boss of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, still a refugee in Lebanon. He criticizes him for not having come forward when he and his son were extradited from the United States and imprisoned in Tokyo for having organized his escape. Nor has he offered to help them with their attorney fees, which are approaching $1 million. The two Americans, without whom the ex-star boss would probably still be in Japan, are nevertheless related to the family of his wife, Carole. This is one of the revelations of the Apple TV documentary series In Search of Carlos Ghosn.
Director James Jones does not make viewers yearn. From the first images, Carlos Ghosn, 69, very fit, appears and settles in front of the camera. Carole Ghosn also answers questions. The tone is set: the series gives them the floor and allows them to provide their version of the facts. The red thread of the four forty-minute episodes: is Carlos Ghosn the victim of a plot or the villain of the story, the superhero gone wrong? In English: “Victim or villain?” »
Shocking images
The series is based on the book by two Wall Street Journal journalists, Paris-based Nick Kostov and Tokyo-based Sean McLain. The life of Carlos Ghosn, his professional rise, his success in Japan, his family and the famous party organized at the Palace of Versailles for the 15th anniversary of the Renault-Nissan Alliance provide enough shocking images for the director not to not have to force the sound accompaniment or the reconstructions by extras to create suspense. At the end of the episode, a succession of flash scenes, like a slide show, announces the twists and turns of the next one and quite irresistibly leads to a sequel…
The series responds very well to a question raised by Ghosn’s arrest: how could the CEO rise so high in the esteem of the Japanese and then fall so violently, to the point of ending up in prison, without any compassion or no support? Overwhelmed by the management of two companies, he took more than ten days, in March 2011, to come and support Nissan employees after the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. He then lost his superhuman status, becoming a villain.
And then there is this note that investigators will find in his phone. There he lists the balance of his bank accounts: 52 million in Japan, 62 million in France, 31.5 million in Switzerland, 39 million in Lebanon, 97 million in America. Followed by this clarification: “Complete by fuse to a thousand”, in short, carry out the Renault-Nissan merger to reach a billion (we assume that these are dollars).
How does Carlos Ghosn justify this relationship to money? “I have always sought autonomy: not depending on other people to lead your life. When you say ‘money is important’, it’s in that context of autonomy: intellectual, emotional, physical and financial,” he says. His silences, finally, are more eloquent.
