Why the real story behind Ghosn's fall matters

Carlos Ghosn, the indicted former chairman of the world's largest automotive group, is finally free of his Japanese jail after nearly four months behind bars. He now prepares for trial from an apartment in Tokyo's trendy Shibuya district, where he lives under strict bail conditions.

Meanwhile, the automotive alliance he created is quickly putting Ghosn in its rearview mirror.

Renault and Nissan began to soothe strained ties last week by announcing a "new start" centered on a consensus-based operating board in place of Ghosn's one-man rule.

Yet smoldering in the background are questions about how this all happened in the first place.

The full story may take a long time to surface. But knowing the scandal's origins is paramount to preventing its repeat and assessing the strength of the alliance's attempted reboot.

The industry needs greater clarity on the two competing narratives surrounding this upheaval.

Ghosn and his lawyer, in their limited public comments since Ghosn's stunning Nov. 19 arrest, have painted Ghosn as the victim of a boardroom coup instigated by Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa.

Saikawa, that narrative goes, was vehemently opposed to Ghosn's plans to forge Renault and Nissan together into an irreversible bond, possibly under the umbrella of a holding company.

The competing claim, forwarded by Saikawa and prosecutors, maintains that Ghosn's creative accounting, on deferred compensation and personal swap losses, simply ran afoul of Japanese law. When it was uncovered, Nissan had little recourse but to report it to the authorities.

But a lot still doesn't add up.

If Nissan's management was just rooting out wrongdoing, why did they discover it so many years after the alleged misconduct began? Why was no one else at Nissan apparently aware? And isn't the timing of Nissan's investigation, coming around the time the merger idea was being floated, suspicious?

At the same time, if Saikawa and his Nissan cohorts were truly bent on deposing Ghosn to prevent a merger, wouldn't that have been one heck of a gamble?

Ghosn spent two decades knitting Renault and Nissan together at a sometimes painstakingly slow pace, largely out of concern for the sensibilities on both sides. Without his patronage and protection, some would say, Nissan would have been gobbled up by Renault all the sooner.

Any coup plotter would see Ghosn's potential successor as a complete wild card without such sympathies or connections. Could the rebel leader be so sure that whoever followed Ghosn wouldn't finally, forcefully bring Nissan to heel as willed by Renault's top shareholder, the French government?

As it turns out, Ghosn's successor is an outsider. Renault's new chairman, Jean-Dominique Senard, was poached from tire maker Michelin. So far, he has epitomized cross-company diplomacy, even agreeing not to seek the chairmanship of Nissan, a position long held by Ghosn.

In that sense, Saikawa got some of what he is said to have wanted. But the world still eagerly awaits Ghosn's side of this sordid affair to fully assess the rest of the story.