Family Affair: U.S. Says Ghosn's Son Chipped in for Pop's Extraction

As the saying goes, the family that orchestrates the clandestine escape of an accused auto executive together, stays together. It seems that, on both sides of the operation to spirit arrested auto titan Carlos Ghosn out of Japan, were father-and-son teams.

In the U.S., arrangements for aircraft rentals and musical instrument boxes were handled by a former U.S. Army Special Forces member and his son, with funding provided by Ghosn himself, and about half a million dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency offered up by Ghosn’s son, U.S. prosecutors claim.

Per Reuters, federal prosecutors said in a court filing this week that Anthony Ghosn made $500,000 in cryptocurrency payments to Peter Taylor, son of military veteran and private security firm founder Michael Taylor.

The Taylors, wanted by Japan and arrested in Massachusetts earlier this year, are seeking bail, but the feds finger both as extreme flight risks. With Ghosn now safely ensconced in Lebanon, the orchestraters of his escape seem more likely to be extradited than the former executive himself. Lebanon doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Japan.

In seeking to squash the Taylor’s bail gambit, prosecutors laid out the financial transactions between them and the Ghosns. Carlos himself wired the father-son duo more than $862,000 in October of 2019, two months before his daring escape. At the time, he was under house arrest in Tokyo, awaiting trial on financial charges Ghosn claims were cooked up by Japanese officials and vindictive Nissan brass.

Shortly after Christmas 2019, Ghosn left his residence and traveled to a bullet train station, hopping on a train bound for another city that just happened to hold an international airport. There, he met men at a hotel and was subsequently hidden in an oversized instrument case and smuggled onto a waiting private jet chartered out of Turkey. Carrying a spare French passport, he switched planes in Istanbul before arriving in Beirut, his childhood home.

While the Taylors claim there exists no law on Japanese books that covers what they’ve been accused of, the U.S. still doesn’t want to grant bail. The pair “now have access to Ghosn’s vast resources with which to flee,” prosecutors stated.

[Image: Nissan]