Carlos Ghosn dark side

Da Thinkfn

In mainstream press, heroes and thieves are created like in the cowboy movies. Everything seems black and white. Heroes can do no wrong, thieves can do no good.

That’s the reason why we need to understand that heroes’ closets are not always free of skeletons. We are not talking about conduit o­n their personal lives (everyone knows about Jack Welsh’s antics, etc, etc). We are talking about their performance o­n the professional arena, where these heroes have been billed as infallible and irreprehensible.

Today, we are talking about Carlos Ghosn. The great architect of Nissan’s recovery, and now Renault’s new CEO. The man is so famous he’s even a comic book hero back in Japan. As lets be clear about It, his fame is deserved, because Nissan was running headlong into bankruptcy before he led it to be o­ne of the most profitable car makers worldwide.

But is it all roses, has Carlos Ghosn never been wrong?

Not so.

What would you think if Carlos Ghosn had, in his recent past, served in the board of a company that almost matched Enron’s record? Well, Carlos Ghosn was in fact o­n such board. o­n the board of a company that was Arthur Andersen’s second largest client in the energy production sector (right next to Enron), that had serious accounting chicanery, that embellished their Profit & Loss statements, and that participated in the California Energy crisis, and finally … that went bankrupt. And this when, just a few Quarters before, you would not have dreamed it from their financial statements (if those were real, that is …).

Yes ... Carlos Ghosn was in the board of Mirant Corporation, during it all. And what’s more, he was in the audit committee, here he should have supervised accounting – precisely where the most serious problems occurred.

As you see, not all heroes have their closets free of skeletons. And lesser heroes might even never have been heroes, if they had such a stain in their careers.

Author

Incognitus, Think Finance