Early in Carlos Ghosn’s Beirut press conference last week, he mentioned the humiliation, while in detention in Japan, of having to read letters from his family “through a looking glass”. The multilingual former head of Renault and Nissan is a confident but sometimes imprecise speaker of English. Yet his inadvertent reference to Lewis Carroll’s novel, in which little is as it seems, is strangely apposite.
Mr Ghosn described how his arrest in 2018 in Japan, where he is accused of financial misconduct, meant he was “brutally taken from my world as I knew it”. In Lebanon, which he reached via bullet train, the inside of a large music equipment case, and a private jet, he is finally among friends. But it is a far cry from his pre-arrest world.
Instead, Mr Ghosn now inhabits a legal limbo, from which he was able to stage what may go down as one of the most extraordinary executive press conferences in recent history.