The wife of former Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn has appealed to Donald Trump for help and rejected suggestions that she was implicated in her husband’s alleged financial crimes.
Ghosn, once one of the most powerful figures in the global car industry, is awaiting trial in Japan over allegations he under-reported his salary and transferred personal investment losses to Nissan.
His Beirut-born wife told the BBC in an interview she hoped the US president would raise her husband’s treatment with Japan’s prime minister, Shinzō Abe, at a G20 world leaders summit in Tokyo later this month.
Carole Ghosn said: “I’d like President Trump to speak to Prime Minister Abe about fair trial conditions, to let me speak to my husband and also to respect his presumption of innocence until proven guilty.”
Ghosn, who has French, Brazilian and Lebanese nationality, was first arrested in November and later released before being rearrested several times over new allegations. He has also been accused of causing Nissan $5m (£4m) in losses by channelling cash from a discretionary company fund into a firm run by his wife, which was used to buy a luxury yacht.
Prosecutors seized Carole Ghosn’s Lebanese passport during a raid of the couple’s Tokyo apartment in early April but failed to find her US one, she said. She flew to France to seek support for her husband from the French government, and then to the US to appeal to Trump. She also plans to ask Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, for help.
Ghosn is currently on bail but has to stay in a small court-appointed apartment in central Tokyo fitted with a camera to monitor his movements, and has to obtain permission from court to meet his wife. She told the BBC she had not spoken to him since early April.
Carole Ghosn was questioned but not charged in a closed hearing at a Tokyo court earlier this year. She said the motive was “to drag me into the story to weaken Carlos – and to shut me up”.
She told the BBC: “I’m a housewife who raised three children, and they’re making me sound like this conniving woman.”
She added: “The lawyers told me that anything I say could hurt him in the trial, so to keep my mouth shut. But I want my husband back. I want him with me. I know he is innocent.”
Nissan moved against him because he was planning a Renault takeover of the Japanese carmaker, she said. “It was a conspiracy to get rid of him,” she claimed, adding: “Everything could have been dealt with internally.”
