The Tokyo District Court has taken the rare decision to grant Carlos Ghosn bail, 107 days after the former Nissan chairman was arrested, jailed and charged on allegations of financial misconduct.
According to the court announcement on Tuesday, which emerged after extended deliberations, Mr Ghosn’s bail was set at ¥1bn ($9m). The approval came with conditions including a ban on him travelling outside of Japan.
The decision raised the prospect Mr Ghosn could be released from detention as early as Tuesday, but prosecutors have filed an appeal. If the appeal is rejected, Junichiro Hironaka, Mr Ghosn’s lawyer, told reporters that the release was likely to be on Wednesday since it will take time to process the payment of his bail.
The court’s ruling followed mounting international criticism of Japan’s so-called hostage justice system, which prolongs the detention of defendants who, like Mr Ghosn, assert their innocence and refuse to make a confession.
Mr Ghosn’s long detention, and the effective silencing of one of the most prominent voices in the global auto industry, has been a source of intense frustration. From behind bars, he has given a handful of brief interviews and has issued a statement in which he vowed to fight all charges against him and restore his reputation.
Tuesday’s approval followed Mr Ghosn’s third attempt to secure bail — a bid mounted by a new legal team assembled in February, whose line-up included a lawyer who made his name securing acquittals in a justice system with a notoriously high conviction rate of more than 99 per cent.
In his latest bail application, Mr Ghosn agreed to be monitored by surveillance cameras to ensure that he did not flee Japan or tamper with evidence. In a previous bail application, Mr Ghosn had pledged to surrender his passport and accept round-the-clock electronic tagging at a secure Japanese apartment — all efforts to counter the prosecutors’ claim that he was a flight risk.
Mr Hironaka told reporters that surveillance cameras would be set up at the entrance of his residence in Tokyo to deter Mr Ghosn from contacting people linked to the investigation.
“I’m glad the [court] decision came out quickly. We submitted specific proposals to the court to make fleeing or tampering of evidence impossible,” Japanese media quoted Mr Hironaka as saying.
The former Nissan boss, who has also resigned as chairman of Renault, has denied charges of understating his pay and allegations that he made several payments through a Nissan subsidiary to a Saudi friend who helped Mr Ghosn address unrealised losses from a derivatives transaction in the wake of the global financial crisis.
In media interviews from a Tokyo prison, Mr Ghosn said his downfall was a result of a “plot and treason” by Nissan executives opposed to his plan to fully merge the Japanese carmaker with its French partner Renault.
Nissan has said its internal investigation uncovered “substantial evidence of blatantly unethical conduct” that led to Mr Ghosn’s dismissal as chairman. The Japanese company has said there was no link between its investigation and merger talks with Renault.
Nissan declined to comment on Tuesday’s court decision.
The long detention of Mr Ghosn has drawn intense international scrutiny not only of Japan’s justice system but also the still-opaque circumstances that led to his downfall. His dramatic arrest on November 19 on the runway apron of Haneda airport was filmed live by a Japanese TV crew who had been tipped off that prosecutors were about to swoop.
An undisclosed number of Nissan executives made plea bargains with the Japanese prosecutors in order to focus the charges around Mr Ghosn, according to people familiar with the investigations.
On Monday, Mr Hironaka said he was looking into whether the Japanese trade ministry played any role in the lead-up to the arrest of his client.
