Don't shout at me.
So can please tell me?
I'm not going to.
Please wait.
You know, I've covered a lot of companies.
I've covered a lot of Machiavellian companies
where, you know, people play rough.
I don't think I've ever seen anything
on the scale of Nissan.
- He is making you, but you act for Nissan.
I mean, it's corrupt.
One of the most dramatic elements
was Ravinder Passi's home being raided
by court officials in Yokohama.
- You scared my wife, you scared my children.
I worked at Nissan for 16 years.
So Rav Passi's journey into the darkest recesses
of the Japanese corporate world
started when he was the general counsel,
the highest corporate lawyer position in the company.
- [Reporter] In the past few minutes, Nissan has revealed
that its chairman has been arrested
after allegations of serious misconduct.
He was tasked with investigating Carlos Ghosn.
And he was told, conduct an internal investigation
and get to the heart of the matter.
And then along the way he started to notice
serious conflicts of interest.
He is one of the few people who knows
an extreme amount of detail
regarding the alleged crimes by Carlos Ghosn.
And he's now ready to tell his own story on the record
about some of the events that happened.
My name's Ravinder Passi.
I'm the former global general counsel
of Nissan Motor Co. Limited.
And you could say yes, I had a front row seat
in terms of what was going on.
- [Reporter] When Carlos Ghosn saved Nissan years ago
he was depicted in Japanese comic books as this hero.
And now maybe we'll see comic books where he's the villain.
In corporate Japan, Nissan was quite an unusual company.
It was led for two decades by a non-Japanese executive.
Well, Carlos Ghosn was a hero
in the Japanese business world.
If you had a global business celebrity
in Japan and worldwide, it was definitely Carlos Ghosn.
- [Reporter] In a country with few foreigners
at the top, he stood out.
But over the years he saved Nissan from bankruptcy,
allied with Renault and Mitsubishi,
and turn the alliance into one
of the most competitive in the world.
Yet as the years went on,
I think his ambitions changed a little bit.
He started thinking about legacy plays.
And one of them was to really tighten the alliance
between Renault and Japan.
And unbeknownst to him, there was a contingent
of senior Nissan executives
that were really felt threatened by that move.
They really thought that they would
lose complete control of the car company.
And even in the government
there was probably a little bit of anxiety
about a national champion in the auto industry
falling under full-blown foreign control.
- [Reporter] Carlos Ghosn was an auto industry leader
respected by many in Japan.
Now he's in jail.
The arrest of Carlos Ghosn
came completely out of the blue.
This was in November of 2018.
He was coming to Japan on Nissan's corporate jet
for a regular executive meeting.
And he was met on the tarmac by Japanese authorities
who whisked him away to jail
and charged him with financial misconduct crimes.
So what happened was that
a power struggle ensued inside the company
and somewhere along the way it was criminalized.
By that I mean that there were allegations
leveled at Carlos Ghosn about the way
he reported his pay to Japanese authorities,
the way he handled money inside the company,
that in other contexts might've been a board action,
might've been handled internally.
A number of executives at Nissan decided
to take this difference
and take it over to the Tokyo Prosecutor's Office.
And that unleashed a chain of events
that would shake the entire auto industry.
So after Carlos Ghosn was arrested,
Nissan launched an internal investigation
into the events that led up to his arrest.
So Rav Passi is tasked with investigating Carlos Ghosn.
And he was told, get to the heart of the matter.
Find out what Carlos Ghosn did wrong
and bring it to our shareholders.
Yeah, it's really complicated
because you had various things coming out of the weeds.
2018, investigation has started
and we become aware of matters in terms of conflicts,
actions by certain individuals that caused some concern
because things might not quite be what they seem.
So in our story we really took a close look
at Hari Nada and his role in Carlos Ghosn's downfall.
Hari Nada is one of the most
fascinating figures inside Nissan.
He's also a lawyer.
He's originally Malaysian.
Hello, Mr. Hari.
And he had a meteoric rise through the company
and became very, very close
to Carlos Ghosn and other top figures.
He had a front row seat at all
the major strategic deliberations at the company.
And when he discovered that Carlos Ghosn,
as his final legacy play,
was going to tighten the relationship
between Renault and Nissan,
he made a decision to go against Carlos Ghosn.
And he became one of the key figures
that decided that Carlos Ghosn had to go.
Hari Nada was somebody who actually
recruited me into the company.
So I have a long-standing relationship with him,
or did have a long-standing relationship with him,
for many, many years
he was a mentor.
I had doubts about the credibility
of the process right at the start.
Hari Nada had a plea deal with the Tokyo prosecutors.
Now that suggests he was intrinsically involved
in some of the wrongdoing, or the allegations of wrongdoing.
And it just didn't smell right, just doesn't sit right.
So there was a basic conflict of interest.
In other words, Hari Nada had to deliver results
to Japanese prosecutors to avoid his own criminal liability,
and he's accusing and leading
the investigation of Carlos Ghosn.
Some of the people who had been involved
in the original alleged crimes
were also looking into the affairs themselves.
Ravinder Passi began pointing out
some of these conflict of interest issues.
And the reason for that is essentially
his concern was for the company.
If the company's own investigation into itself
was compromised, that could lead
to a very weak position in various lawsuits
that it was dealing with across the world.
I had discussions with Hari,
discussions with the statutory auditors
about these conflicts, discussions with HR
about some of these conflicts,
because at that point we reported into him.
You know at the time everything was quite,
as you can imagine, it was, we've got to do this,
we've got to do that, we've got to move fast.
But when you step back and look at some of these things
you just think, "Oh my God, what was going on here?"
Because me, members of my team
were being placed in immediate danger.
Your chairman's been arrested,
a representative director's been arrested.
They both happened to be foreigners.
And then now what we need to do,
we're being instructed to do,
is certain compliance professionals
need to go into properties in Brazil,
for example, and retrieve evidence.
They've got to do it very carefully,
because if they don't do it carefully
they're going to get convicted of criminal activities.
And likewise, when a team of lawyers
were commissioned to go to Lebanon,
I mean, one of my immediate concerns was,
why are lawyers from Nissan being sent
to go to Lebanon to retrieve evidence?
These are just lawyers,
they're corporate lawyers from Nissan.
You had revelations that a number of executives
had benefited from share appreciation rights
when they shouldn't have.
I mean, you know, substantive amounts of money
being taken by these guys
when they weren't entitled to take them.
And you do think, yes, how is this going to look later on?
It's going to look quite concerning.
So that triggered for me the sort of assessment that well,
I'm going to have to do something.
Because up until this point I haven't put down on paper
these conflicts and these issues.
So Rav Passi makes a fateful move.
He writes this letter to the board
listing every suspicion he has in great detail,
backed up by evidence, backed up by memos,
of why this internal investigation had serious problems.
He sends the letter to the board, and it's crickets.
He doesn't hear much of anything.
Nothing happened thereafter, nothing at all.
Just like it just gone into a black box.
And he began to suspect that there was a desire
even at the highest level within Nissan
to kind of sweep these conflicts of interest under the rug.
Unfortunately for me, I think, again with hindsight,
people must've thought that this is the nail
that's sticking out and we can't have this.
Within three days of me submitting that
to the board of directors,
that letter to the independent board of directors,
I was removed from the Ghosn executive conduct matters.
I was then told that I could not
attend board meetings anymore.
And up until that point
I had attended every single board meeting.
I was then also told that after eight years
of being in Japan, I'd be going back to the U.----K.
It eventually transpired that I'd be
the VP of projects and transformation,
managing a team of three.
So you can imagine what this feels like at this stage,
almost an arbitrary removal from Japan
where I've lived for eight years, had three children there,
my family has grown up, and we've been settled there,
having a few months earlier been promoted
to vice president at the global level
to being almost demoted.
So Passi was essentially being reassigned
to get him as far away
from the internal investigation as possible,
and also to a certain extent in retaliation
to some of the issues that he brought up regarding
the internal investigation and Hari Nada.
What happened to Rav Passi can be seen
as a series of corporate humiliations.
I mean, first of all, his immediate responsibilities
were taken away from him.
Eventually he'd lost the coveted general counsel title.
But it didn't stop there.
Toward the end of his stay in Japan,
Rav and his wife were convinced
that they were being followed.
During that period I'd noticed that whilst driving my car
I'd have other cars following me.
First time I noticed this was at around mid-March,
and I was driving, I can't remember where I was going,
but this gray van, small van
just literally started following me.
And I noticed that there was somebody
in the car taking pictures.
And lo and behold, we were absolutely being followed
either by people on foot or other individuals,
two or three, normally two, burly men in a car,
different cars at different times, following us around.
They were following the family as well.
And, you know, given we'd seen,
or I'd seen the Nissan security department
behave in a very, very egregious manner with others
in terms of following and surveilling,
I was very concerned as to what they were doing
and who they were giving this information to.
Because if they're giving this information
to the authorities, you do think, why?
What's going on here?
I mean, this is just not normal behavior.
And this all culminated
in a rather dramatic event in the middle of 2020.
Who are you people?
Where Nissan had hired a legal team
and had obtained an unusual court order
from the district court in Yokohama.
To basically do a search of his home
and seizure of his, you know, corporate laptop and phone,
and other document.
- If you don't let us in now,
we have to break this key.
So it was a pretty extreme way to treat someone
who had spent 16 years at the company.
There's someone else at our door.
These people have all come in.
We don't really know who they are
apart from the fact that I've been shown a badge
that says the Yokohama Court,
and they're here to recover a laptop and the mobile phone.
It was even more weird
because I'd highlighted to the directors
that certain Nissan executives were trying to recover
this laptop and this phone whilst I was still in Japan.
And I was very concerned because it had evidence on there
that related to misconduct matters
and other forms of inappropriate conduct.
It was just an another form of intimidation,
another form of harassment
forcing me almost to leave the company and the country.
Because once they'd retained and obtained these items,
we were still followed.
Which again, I just couldn't understand.
What is the point of doing that?
You know, this is a car company.
This is not the KGB.
I think it's fair to say that Rav Passi
didn't have full battlefield awareness
of all the intrigue going on at Nissan.
I mean, Hari Nada is interesting
because he's both charismatic and charming,
and one of the most brutal corporate in-fighters
one could ever run across.
This a confidential company email, right?
You should not have this.
If he had fallen into line,
he would probably still have his job at Nissan,
be paid very well, and continued his work.
A career that he spent 16 years building at Nissan
is irretrievably broken.
It's been smashed to smithereens.
He and his family paid a huge price, certainly.
But in terms of being able to sleep at night,
I think he's come out ahead.
I highlighted issues to the highest levels of the company
so that they could be dealt with appropriately
by those in charge.
There was no response to those.
And there was retaliation against me.
What's really profound, absolutely profound,
is that none of your colleagues, I mean,
people you have known for years, forget it.
Yeah. You're on your own.
Yeah.
And yeah, you gotta be ready for that.
You've gotta be ready for that.
If you take it on anyway.