The partnership with the French car group Renault has often been controversial at the Japanese manufacturer Nissan. A mudslinging in the boardroom shows that opinions on how far cooperation with the Europeans should go still seem to differ widely.
Tim Canning
Correspondent for business and politics in Japan based in Tokyo.
CEO Makoto Uchida is said to have spied on his deputy Ashwani Gupta for a long time. The aim was to have something in hand against Gupta, who opposed Uchida’s reorientation of the cooperation with Renault. That’s what Nissan consultant Hari Nada wrote in a letter to members of the company’s board of directors, from which the Reuters news agency now quoted.
According to Nissan, it has initiated an investigation into the allegations by an independent external body, but otherwise does not want to comment further on the process.
Ashwani Gupta : Picture: Reuters
In fact, the Japanese group surprisingly announced in April that Gupta should not be nominated for the board again at the next general meeting at the end of June. Until then, Gupta, who had been appointed to the board in 2019, had been considered a prime candidate for the post.
But as the “Financial Times” reported two weeks ago, citing corporate circles, he had recently been confronted with several internal complaints. Since some of these allegations date back more than a year, the impression was created that it could only be a campaign against Gupta.
The next crisis for Nissan
The fact that the allegations of spying that have become public now also put CEO Uchida in an extremely bad light is seen by the Japanese media as the company’s worst crisis since the founder of the Japanese-French alliance Carlos Ghosn was surprisingly arrested in 2018.
Nissan and Renault, together with the also Japanese car manufacturer Mitsubishi, form a tripartite alliance with mutual capital links. However, these are currently to be rebalanced, which is apparently the cause of the current dispute at Nissan. Renault boss Luca De Meo had announced that his company would significantly reduce its stake in Nissan, from around 43 to 15 percent. On the other hand, Nissan announced that it would take a stake in Renault’s electric car subsidiary Ampere.
Tobias Piller Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 63 Lukas Weber Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 10 Patrick Welter, Tokyo Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 23
It is not yet clear how much the allegations will hurt Uchida. In Japan, the powers of companies over their employees go much further than in Germany. For example, companies can monitor employees’ phone calls and email traffic, even behavior outside of the office, if the employer sees company interests at risk. Fraud investigator Akira Takeuchi confirmed this to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.