Mitsubishi Motors\' board meets to remove Chairman Ghosn

Mitsubishi Motors' board meets to remove Chairman Ghosn

Reuters  |  TOKYO 

(Reuters) - Motors Corp's board will meet on Monday to remove from his role as after his arrest and ouster from alliance partner Motor Co last week for alleged financial misconduct.

Renault and sealed an alliance in 1999, when the Japanese automaker was rescued from near-bankruptcy. It was enlarged in 2016 to include and enabled the members to jointly develop products and control costs. The alliance vies with and for the ranking of the world's biggest automaker.

Even as has recovered and grown rapidly, it remains a junior partner in the shareholding structure. Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan and the Japanese automaker holds a reciprocal 15 percent non-voting stake in the French firm. And Nissan is almost 60 percent bigger than Renault by sales.

Top alliance executives are meeting this week in Amsterdam, aiming to shield their joint operations from the fallout of Ghosn's arrest as a power struggle between Nissan and Renault looms. Renault has refrained from firing him as and

Nissan told staff on Monday that the concentration of power in Ghosn meant there was a lack of direct communication between the other alliance board members, a person familiar with the contents of the town hall said.

Nissan said it does not disclose details of internal events or communications to employees.

Ghosn was pushing for a deeper tie-up, including potentially a full merger between Renault and Nissan at the French government's urging, despite strong reservations at the Japanese firm.

Nissan removed Ghosn at a high stakes board meeting on Thursday after allegations of understating his income and using company money for personal use.

Ghosn has denied the allegations, reported on Sunday.

His firing from Motors would mark the removal of the man credited with stabilising the company after it was rocked by a cheating scandal in 2016.

Nissan holds a controlling 34 percent stake in and has two executives on the board. The other is Osamu Masuko, who said last week the alliance may be hard to manage without Ghosn.

While the automakers have stressed that operations and business are proceeding as normal, Nissan has postponed the launch of its high-performance "to ensure that this important product unveiling could receive the coverage it merits", a Nissan said.

Shares in Mitsubishi Motors rose 3.3 percent, while Nissan climbed 1.8 percent, outperforming the broader market's 0.8 percent gain.

(Reporting by Maki Shiraki, and Chang-Ran Kim; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

First Published: Mon, November 26 2018. 11:51 IST