A Tokyo court has handed a suspended sentence to Greg Kelly, a former US director at Nissan Motor Co charged with underreporting his boss Carlos Ghosn’s pay.
The verdict announced yesterday of a six-month sentence suspended for three years allows Kelly to return to the US, even if prosecutors appeal.
Kelly was arrested in November 2018 at the same time as Ghosn, a former Nissan chairman and head of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. Both have insisted they are innocent, saying that the money at the center of the charges was never paid.
Photo: AP
The trial began in September 2020, with Ghosn absent after he jumped bail in late 2019, hiding in a box for musical instruments on a private jet. He fled to Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Japan.
Prosecutors had requested Kelly be sentenced to two years in prison. They said Ghosn, Kelly and Nissan Motor Co underreported Ghosn’s compensation by ¥9 billion (US$77.79 million).
Kelly was searching for legal ways to pay Ghosn to stop him from leaving for a competitor, his legal team said.
Chief judge Kenji Shimotsu said in the ruling that some financial reports contained false information, but that important testimony from a key witness, Toshiaki Ohnuma, who reported directly to Ghosn, was compromised because he had made a plea bargain.
The court earlier found that Ghosn and Ohnuma “conspired” to report false information.
Japanese executives tend to be paid far less than their US counterparts, an important factor in the trial. Disclosure of high executive pay became required in Japan in 2010, and what was disclosed for Ghosn, at about US$9.5 million even without the deferred compensation, had raised eyebrows.
Kelly has been out on bail and living with his wife in a Tokyo apartment. US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel expressed support for Kelly, saying he hoped Kelly could soon be reunited with his grandchildren in the US.
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