No one comes out of the Carlos Ghosn affair smelling of roses

THE LAST time there was an international fugitive from justice called Carlos lying low in Lebanon was in 1975, when Carlos the Jackal hid in Beirut. Today the man on the run is not a terrorist but a celebrity executive known for fanatical cost-cutting. On December 31st Carlos Ghosn, the former boss of Renault-Nissan, who was arrested in Japan in November 2018 on charges of financial misconduct, jumped bail and fled to Lebanon. He grew up there and it has no extradition arrangements with Japan. Mr Ghosn says he is a victim of “injustice and political persecution” by Japan’s legal system. Japan’s prosecutors, meanwhile, view him as a crook evading justice. In fact, this is far from being a simple morality tale. Each of the three main parties in the saga—Renault-Nissan, Japan’s authorities and Mr Ghosn himself—has hard questions to answer.Mr Ghosn took charge of Nissan in 2001 and then, in 2005, of Renault, too. The French car firm has a 43% stake in the Japanese one, and together with Mitsubishi they form an alliance that is the world’s biggest carmaker by volume. It sounds impressive, but even the laser-focused Mr Ghosn struggled to make the fiddly pact run smoothly. He claims that he was planning closer integration of Renault and Nissan, and that nationalistic Japanese executives and officials, who wanted to keep Nissan independent, foiled the plan by engineering his arrest.