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OKAZAKI, Japan: A senior Mitsubishi Motors Corp. official said on Tuesday that its alliance with Nissan Motor and Renault SA could weather management upheavals, a day after sacking Carlos Ghosn as chairman for financial misconduct.
The future of the 19-year-old alliance, one of the world's largest automobile groups, has been questioned after the November 19 arrest and the subsequent dismissal of Ghosn as president of Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors.
Ghosn, 64, is the architect of the alliance and its president. He also remains CEO and President of Renault.
Senior alliance officials are expected to meet in Amsterdam for their regular meeting scheduled later this week, which should begin Wednesday.
Leaders are also expected to discuss Ghosn's presidency, a Nissan source told Reuters, requesting anonymity of the content of the meeting.
Mitsubishi CEO Osamu Masuko announced Monday that he would join the meeting via videoconference, while Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa, who has remained in Japan, has not yet decided to go ahead. he would travel for the meeting, announced two sources of the company. Nissan declined to comment.
In the longer term, Ghosn, under pressure from the French government, had called for a closer merger, including a complete merger between Renault and Nissan, despite strong reservations in the future. Nissan.
Renault owns approximately 43% of Nissan, which in turn holds a 34% majority stake in Mitsubishi Motors. Nissan, the largest sales partner in the alliance, holds 15% of the French partner's voting rights.
S addressing reporters at a research and development center in Okazaki, central Japan, Mitsuhiko Yamashita, executive vice president of Mitsubishi, said that, regardless of the form of the alliance, the three companies would continue to supply more and leverage their connections to develop new technologies.
"I can not say how the three-way partnership could evolve, but as the construction of cars requires more and more new technologies, the time when a single automaker can handle it alone will disappear," said Yamashita, who said been the lead Nissan engineer, said.
He added that the alliance should determine who would make the decisions and how, without the restrictive personality of Ghosn, but was convinced that the partnership was strong enough to meet the challenge.
"Renault and Nissan have a history of nearly 20 years, and two years have passed since the accession of Mitsubishi Motors," he said. "The foundations on which cooperation has been built are becoming solid, so I'm confident we can work with that."
Sealed in 1999 when Nissan was rescued from bankruptcy, the Franco-Japanese alliance was expanded in 2016 to Mitsubishi and allowed members to jointly develop products and control costs.
Yamashita's remark echoed Saikawa's comments that told staff Monday at a public meeting that the alliance remained important to generate synergies.
Saikawa also said that there was "excessive concentration of power" on Ghosn and that in the future, alliance members should communicate better to help preserve their independence.
Ghosn is being held in Tokyo on suspicion of financial misconduct, including an alleged underestimate of his income and his personal use of the company's money. He denied the allegations, the state broadcaster NHK reported.
He did not publicly comment on these allegations and Reuters was unable to contact him or contact his lawyers.
NEW CLAIMS
In new allegations Tuesday, Japanese media reported that Ghosn had transferred to Nissan the losses related to personal investments suffered during the 2008 financial crisis, in order to avoid multi-million dollar losses.
Citing several unnamed sources, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun said that when Ghosn's bank had demanded more guarantees from the executive, he had instead surrendered the rights to the derivatives business to Nissan, which had resulted in a loss of 1.7 billion yen ($ 15 million).
The Japanese Securities and Exchange Commission (SESC) has uncovered this incident during this year's routine inspection, the newspaper said.
Nissan said it can not comment on the report. A spokesman for the SESC said the watchdog could not comment on individual cases.
(Proceedings of Maki Shiraki, Chang-Ran Kim, Ritsuko Ando, Kaori Kaneko, Takahiko Wada, Sam Nussey and Norihiko Shirouzu, Writing of Chang-Ran Kim, Edition of Miyoung Kim and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
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