Carlos Ghosn Slapped with New Charges

According to Japanese law, a person accused of breaking the law can be held without charge for ten days, with an equal amount of time acting as an extension. At the end of that period, formal charges must be made, or the accused released. This law cannot be acceptable when it comes to sexual assault cases which is a highly sensitive one. From knowing the experience of the survivor after a sexual assault, they have mentioned that it is hard to make the accused accept his crime even though there is a lot of evidence that exposes his guilt. The laws must be very strong and must not let go of the accused so easily, mainly while dealing with highly sensible cases.

To date, Ghosn was served with three arrest warrants on different charges, the last one on December 21. The third one expired on Friday.

Ghosn is now indicted for “aggravated breach of trust under Japan’s Companies Act,” as well as understating his compensation, according to a Nissan statement. In essence, the company is accusing him of having transferred personal investment losses over to Nissan.

“Nissan filed the criminal complaint on the basis of Ghosn’s misuse of a significant amount of the company’s funds. Nissan does not in any way tolerate such misconduct and calls for strict penalties,” the company said in a statement.

“Nissan is continuing its own internal investigation into potential illegal expenditure of its funds.”

To date, Ghosn has been charged with more than one white-collar crimes. First, the prosecutors and Nissan accused him of having understated his financial compensation up to the year 2015 to avoid paying taxes.

A second charge was made on Friday and refers to the same crime, but this time for another three years of Ghosn’s career.

The most serious of the charges remains that of breach of trust. It was made based on findings that the executive allegedly paid $14.7 million to Saudi businessman Khaled al-Juffali using the company’s money.

In exchange for that, al-Juffali was to help secure a loan that would cut some of Ghosn investment loses during the 2008 financial crisis.

According to BBC, if Ghosn is found guilty of financial misconduct, he could face up to ten years in prison.