Investors monitor a screen displaying stock information at the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) following the debut of Saudi Aramco's initial public offering (IPO) on the Riyadh's stock market, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 11, 2019.
Ahmed Yosri | Reuters
State-owned oil company Saudi Aramco said on Sunday it has exercised its "greenshoe option" to sell an additional 450 million shares, raising the size of its initial public offering (IPO) to a record $29.4 billion.
Aramco initially raised a then-record $25.6 billion in its IPO in December by selling 3 billion shares at 32 riyals ($8.53) but indicated it may sell additional shares through the over-allotment of shares.
A greenshoe option, or over-allotment, allows companies to issue more shares in an IPO when there is greater demand from participants during the initial offering.
Investors were allocated the additional shares for the option during the book-building process, Aramco said.
Aramco said "no additional shares are being offered into the market today and the stabilizing manager will not hold any shares in the company as a result of exercise of the over-allotment option."
Aramco shares have been volatile recently because of geopolitical concerns as tensions between the United States and Iran rose after President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that killed a top Iranian commander and raised fears of war.
Shares of Aramco fell to 34 riyals on Jan. 8, its lowest since the stock began trading on Dec. 11, but closed at 35 riyals on Thursday.
Thursday's closing price valued Aramco at $1.87 trillion, above the IPO price, which valued the company at $1.7 trillion, but below Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's coveted $2 trillion target.
Every weekday morning, Greg Kelly, the former Nissan executive accused of helping Carlos Ghosn hide his compensation from the Japanese authorities, makes his way to his lawyer’s office in Tokyo to chip away at a monumental task: reviewing close to 1 billion pages of documents.
His wife, Donna Lynn Kelly, who everyone calls Dee, goes off to Japanese class.
That’s the life of the two Americans in Japan as they await Mr. Kelly’s trial, according to a person who knows Mr. Kelly and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personal matters. The timing of the trial, once set to begin in April, is now uncertain after Mr. Ghosn’s sudden flight to Lebanon two weeks ago. A pretrial hearing next Thursday may shed more light.
Mr. Kelly, whose passport was taken away when he was arrested in November 2018, is preparing to defend himself against criminal charges that, as Mr. Ghosn’s chief of staff and the man nominally in charge of Nissan’s internal auditing, he helped Mr. Ghosn conceal how much he was being paid. The prosecutors in Japan declined to comment on Mr. Kelly’s case.
Mr. Kelly says he is innocent and just wants to go home to Tennessee. At 63, he suffers from a spinal condition that has left him with weakness in his extremities and an uncertain gait that sometimes causes him to trip and fall. He has an infant grandson in Seattle he has never met.
On Jan. 8, he watched his former boss, appearing fit and pugnacious in Beirut, address a room packed with journalists. Over nearly three hours, Mr. Ghosn proclaimed his innocence in four languages. He mentioned Mr. Kelly twice.
“Greg Kelly, an honorable man, husband and father, who was brutally taken from his family,” Mr. Ghosn said. “My plight has captured headlines,” he said. “You cannot forget Greg’s ordeal.”
In Beirut, Mr. Ghosn has a pink mansion in an upscale part of town. The Kellys live in an apartment, small but clean, with a microwave but no stove. Ms. Kelly can visit family in the United States, but she spends most of her time with her husband in Tokyo, the person said. Her visa depends on her studying Japanese, so she spends several hours a day in class. If she doesn’t score high enough on the exams, she can be sent home.
While Mr. Ghosn used a corporate jet to visit homes in Brazil, Beirut, Paris and Tokyo before the 2018 arrests, Mr. Kelly led a more pedestrian life as a Nissan executive, according to two people who know him.
A lawyer, Mr. Kelly joined Nissan in 1988, enticed by a recruiter who described “an extremely interesting Japanese company in Tennessee. I think it would a good fit for you,” he recalled last year in an interview with the publication Bungei Shunju.
He and his wife raised a family — two sons — in Brentwood, Tenn., a Nashville suburb near Nissan’s North American headquarters, and Ms. Kelly worked as an accountant. While the children were young, the Kellys were members of the Church of the Good Shepherd, a local Episcopalian congregation, with Dee and their son Mike writing and directing Christmas pageants.
In 2008, their lives changed. Mr. Kelly’s job, as senior executive in Nissan’s human resources department, took him to Japan, and Ms. Kelly came with him. He became a senior vice president and then, in 2012, joined Nissan’s board — Nissan’s first American board member —while working for Mr. Ghosn, the chairman, as the company’s top legal officer.
He was considered a close associate of the chairman, a reliable vote to help Mr. Ghosn carry out his plans for an alliance of Nissan and Renault, the French automaker Mr. Ghosn also headed. But Mr. Kelly has rejected that description, pointing out that he was not on the board’s top decision-making body, the executive committee. “Considering this, why was I called Ghosn’s right-hand man?” he told Bungei Shunju.
The Kellys enjoyed Japan — “Greg and I often discussed the possibility of living in Japan part-time in our retirement,” Ms. Kelly later said — but their lives remained rooted in the United States.
In 2008, they bought a vacation house in Sanibel Island, Fla., in a neighborhood crammed with a network of canals leading to the Gulf of Mexico, according to property documents. They joined a sailing club that organized potlucks at picnic huts on the beach and luncheons at local seafood restaurants.
“You’re dealing with an all-American guy, not extravagant, no racehorses, nothing,” said the second person who knows Mr. Kelly. “Very ordinary guy, and charming, very American in the positive sense of the word.”
Mr. Kelly retired to Tennessee in 2015 but kept his board seat. In November 2018, Mr. Kelly recalled in the interview with Bungei Shunju, a senior executive urged him to attend a board meeting in Japan. Mr. Kelly, facing spinal surgery within two weeks at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said he would prefer to attend via video conference. The official insisted that he come in person, that the company would send a plane to pick him up and that he would be home within three days, in time for Thanksgiving.
Minutes after landing in Tokyo, he was arrested. He spent the next 34 days in a cell at Tokyo Detention House, sleeping on a futon on the floor.
Before he was released on bail on Christmas Day in 2018, Ms. Kelly recorded a video and distributed it news organizations, begging for her husband to be freed or at least to be allowed to consult with a Japanese doctor she had identified as one of the country’s leading experts on Mr. Kelly’s condition. He would eventually undergo surgery in Tokyo for spinal stenosis, but it did not relieve his symptoms.
In September, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission accused Mr. Kelly, along with Mr. Ghosn and Nissan, of breaking American disclosure laws. Mr. Kelly agreed to pay $100,000 and submit to a five-year ban on serving as a senior executive of a public company to settle the charges without admitting or denying guilt.
Prosecutors have barred his lawyers from putting the voluminous documents in his case online and making them searchable, which means that only Mr. Kelly’s Japanese defense team, or others who come to their Tokyo offices, can see them.
Mr. Kelly has insisted on helping to review the mountain of documents prosecutors say they will use to make their case. He spends hours each day at his lawyer’s office.
“Greg has been wrongly accused as part of a power grab by several Nissan executives,” Ms. Kelly said in the video. “The truth of this will come out.”
In the 2019 magazine interview, Mr. Kelly was defiant about his and Mr. Ghosn’s innocence, contending that Hiroto Saikawa, who was then Nissan’s chief executive, approved the compensation plans that led to the arrests. “How come Ghosn and I were suddenly arrested without one instance of being asked to explain and no discussions or meeting on the subject,” he said.
But then Mr. Kelly added, “I am very proud to have worked for this amazing company, Nissan, for over 30 years. It has been an honor.”
Liz Alderman in Paris and Makiko Inoue in Tokyo contributed reporting.
The Secure Act aims to make it easier for small employers to offer retirement benefits. But some analysts say the new law doesn't go far enough because it's optional and doesn't apply to gig workers.
Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
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Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images
The most powerful way to get people to save for retirement in recent decades has been through benefits offered at their job. But a lot of people — about half the American workforce — don't get that from their employers.
"Over 50 million workers right now don't have access to any retirement plan at all," says David Certner, legislative counsel for AARP.
Small employers are the biggest segment lacking coverage, he says. That's because many small businesses lack time and money to set such programs up, he says.
The new law, called the Secure Act, aims to help with that in part by allowing smaller employers to band together to share the administrative burden — making it cheaper and easier to offer retirement benefits. How many will do so and expand their retirement benefits is far from clear, because the program is optional.
And, Certner says, the law won't apply to many other workers who aren't classified as employees. That's because they're contractors or gig workers who aren't eligible for those benefits.
The Secure Act also gives people more flexibility to save for longer periods of time and delay withdrawing funds. It also allows employers to offer other investment options like annuities.
The fact that the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support last month is significant, says Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. But she says the changes are modest.
She notes that the government has tried — and largely failed — to encourage more small businesses to offer retirement benefits through programs like the Treasury Department's now-expired myRA program.
She expects it will be the same with this latest law.
"I don't really think they're really going to move the needle much at all," Munnell says.
The new law requires employers offering retirement benefits to include part-time workers who've been on the job at least three years. That could help about 4 million workers, Munnell says.
Much bigger changes to retirement law have been occurring at the state level, experts say. Ten states — including Oregon, California and Illinois — recently started requiring private employers to enroll their workers in individual retirement accounts if the employers don't offer their own benefits. Those state programs are expected to expand retirement savings to 15 million more people.
"Without a mandate, without somebody saying, 'Mr. Small Businessman, you have to do something for your employees,' I don't think we're going to see much change," Munnell says. That's why she says she'd like to see such rules extend to all 50 states.
Ex-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn excoriated the Japanese legal system this week during a two-hour press conference defending his decision to flee the country as he awaited trial for financial crimes tied to the Japanese automaker.
“I did not escape justice. I fled injustice and persecution, political persecution,” Ghosn said at a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon on Wednesday. “You're going to die in Japan or you've got to get out.”
The condemnation from Ghosn, once dubbed “an auto industry superhero,” opens up Japan’s legal system to increased scrutiny ahead of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. It’s a system whose prosecutors secure convictions over 99% of the time. It’s one that allows a trial by a jury of one’s peers only for certain crimes. And it’s one that, according to Ghosn, interrogated him without the presence of his lawyers and denied him the right to a quick trial on trumped-up charges.
“This whole incident has taken a criminal justice system that I think has often been shielded from the view of the world and it’s brought it front and center,” says Matthew Wilson, president of Missouri Western State University, who’s a lawyer with extensive experience working in Japan.
‘Pretty much everybody gets convicted’
Ghosn — a 65-year-old Brazilian-born French and Lebanese citizen — asserted that he’d been deprived of freedom since his arrest in November 2018 for allegedly under-reporting his compensation in public filings. He was detained for more than 100 days before his release on $8.9 million bail in March and his cinematic escape late last month.
Former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn gestures as he speaks during a news conference at the Lebanese Press Syndicate in Beirut, Lebanon January 8, 2020. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
In his press conference on Wednesday, Ghosn suggested that he fled to Lebanon because his conviction in Japan was a foregone conclusion. He’s not necessarily being paranoid. As has been widely reported, Japan has over a 99% criminal conviction rate.
“Pretty much everybody prosecuted gets convicted,” says J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School and a noted authority on Japanese law. Still, he noted, “The Japanese system, it’s basically a fair one.”
While the 99% conviction rate might suggest a rigged system, experts on Japanese law are quick to point out that prosecutors there are extremely selective about which cases they take on.
“There’s surprisingly few prosecutors in Japan and so they’re overworked,” Ramseyer told Yahoo Finance, noting that they therefore focus on the “slam dunk” cases.
‘Two extremes in executive compensation’
The case against Ghosn began in November 2018, when he was arrested on his corporate jet after it landed at a Tokyo airport and accused of failing to report millions of dollars in compensation. A 2010 Japanese law requires companies to disclose top executive pay, a kind of “social sanction” meant to embarrass companies that overpay their chiefs, according to Bruce Aronson, an affiliated scholar at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at the NYU School of Law.
“The U.S. and Japan are two extremes in executive compensation,” Aronson said, explaining that outsize CEO compensation is not as socially acceptable in Japan as it is in the U.S.
Still, it would have been “bizarre” to haul Ghosn to jail simply for failing to report part of his compensation, according to Ramseyer, the Harvard Law School professor.
Former Nissan Motor Chariman Carlos Ghosn leaves the Tokyo Detention House in Tokyo, Japan April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Ultimately, those were not the only charges against Ghosn. He was re-arrested in December 2018 and accused of shifting personal investment losses to Nissan and hiding more income. Japanese prosecutors arrested him yet again in April 2019, accusing him of shifting $5 million meant for an overseas distributor to his own company.
For his part, Ghosn contends that Nissan conspired to have him prosecuted because they feared he would merge Nissan with the French carmaker, Renault, where he was formerly the CEO.
In a statement last week, Nissan called Ghosn’s escape to Lebanon “extremely regrettable.” The automaker said it “discovered numerous acts of misconduct by Ghosn through a robust, thorough internal investigation” and that he was “not fit to serve as an executive.”
A unique criminal justice system with its own flaws
Like every criminal justice system, Japan’s has flaws. While Japan provides jury trials for some violent crimes, Ghosn likely would have been tried by a panel of three judges — individuals paid by the very government that was prosecuting him. And even if those judges acquitted Ghosn, he couldn’t consider himself a free man. That’s because, unlike in the U.S., Japan allows prosecutors to appeal cases if they lose them.
“Almost without exception, when a prosecutor loses … they are going to appeal. That’s almost automatic,” says Wilson, the Missouri Western State president with extensive experience working in the Japanese legal system.
While a trial by a jury of independent peers might seem more fair than one by judges, Aronson of NYU’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute noted that Japan has one of the world’s most independent judiciary systems despite Ghosn’s claims that the system is corrupt.
“You can’t bribe a judge in Japan,” Aronson said, noting that Ghosn fled to Lebanon, a country ranked by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index as more corrupt than 137 other countries, including Japan (which was just more corrupt than 17 other countries.)
Still, Ghosn’s case was an unusual one even in Japan, in part because he faced prison time for allegations related to financial crimes. “White collar criminals almost never go to prison [in Japan], which is not true in the U.S.,” Aronson said. “In the U.S., I think there’s more of a range of outcomes.”
The fact that Ghosn did face criminal charges raises legitimate questions about how Japan treats all of its criminal defendants, not just those with the means to be spirited away to a friendly country.
Carole Ghosn, wife of former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn is seen during his news conference at the Lebanese Press Syndicate in Beirut, Lebanon January 8, 2020. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
In April 2019, over 1,000 Japanese professionals and lawyers wrote a letter calling to reform Japan’s legal system. The letter noted that criminal defendants aren’t allowed to contact family members (in Ghosn’s case, he could have no contact with his wife), and that most suspects in jail were “placed under constant surveillance.”
“Japan’s criminal justice practices have long been described as ‘hostage justice (hitojichi-shiho).’ The Code of Criminal Procedure of Japan allows suspects to be detained up to 23 days before indictment. The authorities interpret the code to oblige detainees to face interrogations throughout this period. ... It is not uncommon for suspects to be yelled at from close range. Furthermore, suspects are not allowed to have lawyers present during questioning,” the letter noted.
In recent years, Japan has made certain reforms to its criminal justice system. Japan abolished trial by jury in 1943 but reintroduced it for certain crimes in 2009. Just In 2018, the country created a system for plea bargaining allowing more lenient sentences for defendants who feed prosecutors information about other suspects. The spotlight that Ghosn cast on the system’s shortcomings may spur further reforms to that system, especially as Japan prepares to welcome the world for the Olympics.
In the meantime, Ghosn may remain in Lebanon, which does not have an extradition treaty with Japan but imposed a travel ban on the former Nissan executive this week. Unless he faces a trial outside of Japan, it may never be clear whether the allegations against him have any merit.
“If in fact he’s been stealing from the company,” noted Ramseyer, the Harvard Law School professor, “it’s hard to feel terribly sorry for him.”
Erin Fuchs is deputy managing editor for Yahoo Finance.
FILE PHOTO: 70th Cannes Film Festival – Screening of the film "L'Amant double" (Amant Double) in competition - Red Carpet Arrivals - Cannes, France. 26/05/2017. Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, and his wife Carole pose. Picture taken May 26, 2017. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese authorities have requested the International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO) for an Interpol wanted notice for the wife of former Nissan Motor (7201.T) boss Carole Ghosn, local media reported on Saturday.
If the notice is issued for his wife, Carole, the couple’s travel chances outside of Lebanon may be restricted, Mainichi newspaper said. Interpol has already issued an arrest warrant for Ghosn.
The request from Japan was made on Thursday, Mainichi and other Japanese media said, quoting unnamed sources.
Officials at the Japanese justice ministry weren’t immediately available for comment.
Japanese prosecutors on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant against Ghosn’s wife for alleged perjury, as officials stepped up efforts to bring the fugitive car industry boss back to face trial on financial misconduct charges.
Ghosn, the former Nissan and Renault (RENA.PA) chairman, fled Japan to Lebanon, his childhood home, last month as he awaited trial on charges of under-reporting earnings, breach of trust and misappropriation of company funds, all of which he denies.
His dramatic escape has raised tensions between Japan and Lebanon, where Ghosn slammed the Japanese justice system at a two-hour news conference on Wednesday, prompting Japan’s Justice Minister to launch a rare and forceful public response.
Lebanon, which has no extradition agreement with Japan, may lift a travel ban on Carlos Ghosn if files pertaining to his case do not arrive from Japan within 40 days, caretaker justice minister Albert Serhan said in a statement on Friday.
Reporting by Yuka Obayashi; Editing by Shri Navaratnam
CES 2020 is a wonderful yet bewildering place, jam-packed with available-right-now tech and never-will-be moonshots in equal measure. It's hard to find -- let alone make sense of -- the automobiles, pieces of technology and services that will impact you, the car-buying consumer.
We're here to help. Going beyond Roadshow's favorite bits of mobility tech and the best cars and concepts, here are some of the key themes and breakthroughs at CES 2020 that our editors believe will reshape the future of mobility -- both in the near term and the distant future.
Biometrics
No, nothing like the Mercedes-Benz Vision AVTR is going to be parked in your driveway during this new decade. But some of the key tech inside this striking, Avatar-inspired showcar is likely to figure into your automotive future sooner than you think: biometrics. This new concept car not only detects your pulse (confirming it with nudge on your seatback) while also detecting your breathing, it does away with a steering wheel and instead recognizes the driver with a multifunctional control element activated with one's palm.
Long before full autonomy becomes a reality, cars are going to be ever-closer monitoring drivers and occupants for many reasons, including making sure they're paying attention to the act of driving, optimizing safety systems in the event of a crash and to tailor infotainment experiences to individual passengers. Biometrics will be an important new way to help accomplish these goals.
Sony getting into cars in a big way
Sony is certainly no stranger to the automobile -- it's been working on in-car audio and various other nooks and crannies in the motoring world for many years. But it's never signaled quite a splash as it did at CES, with the jaw-slackening debut of what looks to be a fully baked electric car.
At the moment, Sony says it has no plans to actually offer this car -- a sleek-looking four-door designed with supplier powerhouse Magna -- for sale to consumers. Instead, consider this unnamed vehicle to be a rolling showcase for its Vision-S connected car platform. The package includes no fewer than 33 sensors arrayed inside and outside the vehicle, plus the mother of all infotainment systems. The dashboard is dominated by no fewer than six screens, and there's Sony's 360 Reality Audio system for the sound from the streaming movie and game feeds to wash over passengers.
When a company with the size, history and expertise of Sony decides it wants to worm its way into the cars of tomorrow, you can bet it's going to impact the automotive landscape.
Smart helmets
Even if you're not a motorcyclist, you stand to benefit from the advent of smart helmets. Why? They will make the roadways safer for all motorists, and even pedestrians. In the case of Tali Connected's new helmet, that includes high-visibility features like built-in turn signals and taillights.
In addition to trick lighting, Tali's helmet will sync with a smartphone app via Bluetooth to enable not only expected features like telephony and music, but also navigation directions and even accident/fall detection and automatic emergency service notification.
Velodyne's Velabit lidar sensor is tiny and shatters the $100 price barrier.
Velodyne
Cheap lidar
Never mind what Tesla'sElon Musk says, nearly all automakers and industry experts agree that lidar is the cornerstone of our self-driving future. Laser radar will work in concert with other sensors, including cameras, ultrasonic and long-range radar to help the cars and trucks of tomorrow 'see' their way around. The key will be getting the cost of these sensors down to a point where all cars -- not just high-end models -- can have them onboard.
Velodyne has just introduced its Velabit lidar at CES, and not only is it tiny -- smaller than a deck of playing cards -- it shatters the price barrier, costing $100 per sensor. Just last year, rival Luminar made waves by promising to offer lidar sensors for under $1,000. The Velodyne and Luminar sensors may not share exactly the same specs, but the rapid price drop year over year is a ready illustration of how much progress is being made in this area.
While we still wouldn't bet on your next car offering hands-off Level 4 autonomy, major strides like this in cost and miniaturization should help pull that horizon in closer.
Lightyear
Solar-powered cars
Now, the idea of integrating solar panels into a vehicle's roof has been around for quite a long time, and thus far, the impact of the technology has been pretty minimal. These days, you can soak in the sunshine juice in a Toyota Prius or a Karma Revero, but their returns on investment are pretty minimal. But thanks to improvements in both efficiency and cost reductions, you can expect a lot more of this sunlight-capturing tech in the coming years, especially as cars load up on more and more power-sapping sensors for increasing levels of automation and even more creature comforts.
We're not honestly suggesting that your next car is going to rely solely on sun power. Not even close. But solar is finally starting to make meaningful inroads as a supplementary power source for new vehicles. And that trend isn't just accelerating on expensive cars, either -- Hyundai will shortly offer the technology on its brand-new Sonata. The Korean automaker claims its new roof array will generate enough juice to provide around 800 miles of additional range per year in its forthcoming Sonata Hybrid model. That's significant.
Some companies are even more ambitious than that. The slipstream Lightyear One presented at CES 2020 promises to deliver some 7.5 miles of range per hour of charge time. That means that if you left your car outside during a sunny eight-hour workday, you could theoretically recover some 60 miles of charging, likely more than your commute home.
Even if the $170,000 Lightyear One never truly gets off the ground, we're betting you're going to see a lot more cars augmented by solar power in the coming years.
Cars as mobile payment systems
All of the technologies and products above are promising, but maybe you need some life-changing automotive tech right now. Visa and SiriusXM may just have the cure for what ails you: in-dash ordering and automated payment for things you use every day. Food. Gas. Tolls. Parking. All from your driver's seat using either your car's infotainment display or voice commands.
We've seen systems from General Motors and others where you can order your morning coffee, but some functions require also interacting with your phone directly, making them less convenient. In the case of GM's Marketplace, they also require that you own one of the company's vehicles.
With the SiriusXM/Visa tech, your car just has to have a 4G-LTE data connection and SiriusXM's connected services, both of which you may already have. Now, in order to make the most of this, the two companies are working feverishly to sign up participating vendors and services en masse to ensure that your corner gas station and most-frequently used toll road are ready to accept your mobile payment. That's likely to take some time, especially if you live outside of major metropolitan areas, but given the ubiquity of Visa and SiriusXM, this convenient service may become part of your daily routine quicker than you think.
Smart visors
With a lot of the offerings at CES, it sometimes feels like you need a PhD to understand these new pieces of technology. Not just how they work, but how they might benefit you and your motoring life. Bosch's Virtual Visor is refreshingly easy to understand: It improves on the nearly century-old sun visor by offering up to 90% more visibility. How? By employing a transparent LCD visor that can be intelligently blacked-out section by section to only block those areas where the sun is impeding the driver's visibility. It does so with powerful software and a simple driver-facing camera.
While this tech is likely at least a few years from finding its way into passenger cars and commercial trucks, because it's being developed by one of the auto industry's largest suppliers, it's likely to show up quickly on a wide variety of makes and models. And hey, even if your next car, truck or SUV doesn't come with it, if the vehicles you're sharing the road with have the technology, you're less likely to get in an accident because they've been blinded by glare.
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TOKYO (AP) — A lawyer for Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s former chairman who skipped bail in Japan and fled to Lebanon, on Friday slammed a gaffe by the Japanese justice minister who said that Ghosn should “prove” his innocence.
Francois Zimeray said in a statement addressed to Justice Minister Masako Mori that her mistake reflected Japanese justice, which goes against the human rights principle of presumption of innocence.
Mori has apologized for the error and said she meant to say the suspect should “assert” innocence, not prove it.
“The presumption of innocence, respect of dignity and rights of defense have been essential components of what constitute a fair trial,” he said.
“Japan is an admirable, modern, otherwise advanced country. It deserves better than an archaic system that holds innocent people hostage. The onus is on you to abolish it.”
He stressed it is up to prosecution to prove guilt, not the other way around.
Ghosn, who was awaiting trial on financial misconduct charges, fled Tokyo and appeared in Beirut Dec. 30.
He is unlikely to face trial here as Lebanon does not extradite its citizens.
He reiterated in a news conference in Beirut this week that he was innocent and that he faced trumped up charges because Nissan Motor Co., prosecutors and Japanese officials sought to block a fuller merger between Nissan and alliance partner Renault SA of France.
Japan’s conviction rate is higher than 99%, and human rights advocates have long questioned the fairness of its judicial system.
Ghosn has said it is rigged and unjust.
Japan’s judiciary has come under the spotlight over Ghosn’s case and his harsh words earlier this week about how he was treated in detention, stuck in solitary confinement and grilled by prosecutors without a lawyer present, as well his bail conditions that barred him from seeing his wife.
Mori has said Japan’s system upholds human rights, provides a fair trial and has made for a low crime rate.
She accused Ghosn of “propagating both within Japan and internationally false information on Japan’s legal system and its practice.”
“That is absolutely intolerable,” she said Thursday.
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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama
