(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- One morning last November, several hundred businesspeople filed into an auditorium on the third floor of a skyscraper in Tokyo’s financial district. The occasion was a forum marking the centenary of the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan. Among the keynote speakers was an exemplar of the two countries’ warm relationship: Hiroto Saikawa, the chief executive officer of Nissan Motor Co. and a linchpin of its almost 20-year alliance with France’s Renault SA.
In his address, Saikawa extolled the partnership, a confection of cross-shareholdings and joint production whose durability had consistently surprised skeptics. “The alliance allowed us to compete with our major rivals,” said Saikawa, who’s 65, thin, and fairly tall, with a mostly unlined face and cheeks lightly mottled by freckles. He wore rimless glasses, a purple tie, and a dark navy suit with a gold pin in the shape of Nissan’s all-caps logo at the left lapel. Rarely one for elegant rhetoric, he instead boasted of Renault-Nissan’s accomplishments: combined operations that had generated billions in savings, a strong position in electric vehicles, more than 10 million cars sold in 2017.
To those present, the speech was unremarkable, even boring. But as he spoke, Saikawa was harboring a secret known only to a tiny number of Nissan managers and a team of prosecutors in the Special Investigations Unit, an elite arm of Japanese law enforcement. En route to Tokyo at that moment, aboard a Gulfstream G650 with the registration number N155AN, was Carlos Ghosn, the charismatic executive who’d engineered the Renault-Nissan alliance and now served as chairman of both companies. He’d be landing at Haneda airport in less than six hours, prepared for a busy week: a board meeting, discussions with important Japanese officials, then a trip to China. Saikawa knew none of that would take place.
