At the Japanese car company Nissan According to insiders, the CEO is said to have spied on his deputy for a long time. CEO Makoto Uchida (56) had his board colleague and chief operating officer Ashwani Gupta (53) spied on, according to a letter from a leading Nissan consultant to the independent members of the board of directors, which was available to the Reuters news agency. According to the letter and four people who were informed, Uchida wanted to have something against Gupta, his resistance to a new agreement with the French partner company Renault to weaken. Nissan said it had commissioned independent bodies to clarify the allegations and declined to comment further.
Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi maintain a tripartite alliance with cross-shareholdings. Most recently, however, Renault boss Luca de Meo (56) drastically reduced the influence of the Japanese, so that in future both sides will share in the same amount. At the beginning of this year, Renault announced that Renault was reducing its stake in Nissan from around 43 to 15 percent. The 28 percent stake in the Japanese automaker is to be transferred to a French trustee. Nissan announced that it would take a stake in Renault’s electric car subsidiary.
The allegations come at an unfavorable time for the Japanese car company: Carlos Ghosn (69), the former head of the three-way alliance of car manufacturers Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi has sued automaker Nissan for more than $1 billion as announced earlier this week. This emerges from a copy of the lawsuit that was filed with the Lebanese public prosecutor’s office last month and is available to various news agencies.
The former CEO once forged the car alliance between Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi and was considered one of the most influential industrial bosses in the world. His arrest in Japan had caused an uproar in the car industry at the end of 2018. In a dramatic escape, Ghosn was smuggled out of the country in 2019 – hidden in a box on board a private jet.