Ghosn faced 7 hours a day of questioning in Japan: lawyer - Fox Business

Fox News senior legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano says former chairman and CEO of Renault Carlos Ghosn will most likely stay in Lebanon and spend a lot of money to protect himself.

By YURI KAGEYAMA AP Business Writer

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TOKYO (AP) — A lawyer for former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn, who fled to Lebanon while awaiting trial in Japan, said his client was questioned an average of seven hours a day without a lawyer present.

Takashi Takano said in a blog post Saturday the questioning continued through weekends, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Takano has said he told Ghosn he couldn't expect a fair trial in Japan, but his chances of winning were good because the evidence against him was so weak.

Japan's judicial system has come under fire over Ghosn's case. Critics have for years said the prolonged detentions tend to coerce false confessions. Suspects can be detained even without any charges.

CARLOS AND CAROLE GHOSN SPEAK OUT TOGETHER FOR FIRST TIME SINCE BEING REUNITED

Japanese prosecutors and Justice Minister Masako Mori have repeatedly defended the nation's system as upholding human rights, noting Japan boasts a low crime rate. Mori said the system follows appropriate procedures under Japanese law, stressing that every culture is different.

Takano said he recently looked at prosecutors' data and Ghosn's notes to tally the hours of questioning for 70 of the days Ghosn was detained. On three days, Ghosn had been questioned for some 11 hours, according to Takano's tally.

Ghosn was detained under two separate arrests for 130 days. He has been charged with underreporting his future compensation and of breach of trust in diverting Nissan Motor Co. money for alleged personal gain.

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In a news conference in Beirut lasting more than two hours, Ghosn reasserted his innocence, and accused Nissan and Japanese government officials of plotting his removal.

Ghosn, who led Nissan for two decades, has said the compensation was never decided, and the payments were for legitimate business.

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Much of his news conference was devoted to criticizing Japanese justice as rigged and harsh. He said he had been grilled without a lawyer present while held in solitary confinement. He advised all foreigners to leave.

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2020-01-12 11:47:34Z
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Saudi Aramco raises IPO to record $29.4 billion through greenshoe option - CNBC

Investors monitor a screen displaying stock information at the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) following the debut of Saudi Aramco's initial public offering (IPO) on the Riyadh's stock market, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 11, 2019.

Ahmed Yosri | Reuters

State-owned oil company Saudi Aramco said on Sunday it has exercised its "greenshoe option" to sell an additional 450 million shares, raising the size of its initial public offering (IPO) to a record $29.4 billion.

Aramco initially raised a then-record $25.6 billion in its IPO in December by selling 3 billion shares at 32 riyals ($8.53) but indicated it may sell additional shares through the over-allotment of shares.

A greenshoe option, or over-allotment, allows companies to issue more shares in an IPO when there is greater demand from participants during the initial offering.

Investors were allocated the additional shares for the option during the book-building process, Aramco said.

Aramco said "no additional shares are being offered into the market today and the stabilizing manager will not hold any shares in the company as a result of exercise of the over-allotment option."

Aramco shares have been volatile recently because of geopolitical concerns as tensions between the United States and Iran rose after President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that killed a top Iranian commander and raised fears of war.

Shares of Aramco fell to 34 riyals on Jan. 8, its lowest since the stock began trading on Dec. 11, but closed at 35 riyals on Thursday.

Thursday's closing price valued Aramco at $1.87 trillion, above the IPO price, which valued the company at $1.7 trillion, but below Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's coveted $2 trillion target.

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2020-01-12 08:33:00Z
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Carlos Ghosn Skipped Bail. This Man Was Left Behind. - The New York Times

Every weekday morning, Greg Kelly, the former Nissan executive accused of helping Carlos Ghosn hide his compensation from the Japanese authorities, makes his way to his lawyer’s office in Tokyo to chip away at a monumental task: reviewing close to one billion pages of documents.

His wife, Donna Lynn Kelly, whom everyone calls Dee, goes off to Japanese class.

That’s the life of the two Americans in Japan as they await Mr. Kelly’s trial, according to a person who knows Mr. Kelly and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personal matters. The timing of the trial, once set to begin in April, is now uncertain after Mr. Ghosn’s sudden flight to Lebanon two weeks ago. A pretrial hearing next Thursday may shed more light.

Mr. Kelly, whose passport was taken away when he was arrested in November 2018, is preparing to defend himself against criminal charges that, as Mr. Ghosn’s chief of staff and the man nominally in charge of Nissan’s internal auditing, he helped Mr. Ghosn conceal how much he was being paid. The prosecutors in Japan declined to comment on Mr. Kelly’s case.

Mr. Kelly says he is innocent and just wants to go home to Tennessee. At 63, he suffers from a spinal condition that has left him with weakness in his extremities and an uncertain gait that sometimes causes him to trip and fall. He has an infant grandson in Seattle he has never met.

On Jan. 8, he watched his former boss, appearing fit and pugnacious in Beirut, address a room packed with journalists. Over nearly three hours, Mr. Ghosn proclaimed his innocence in four languages. He mentioned Mr. Kelly twice.

“Greg Kelly, an honorable man, husband and father, who was brutally taken from his family,” Mr. Ghosn said. “My plight has captured headlines,” he said. “You cannot forget Greg’s ordeal.”

In Beirut, Mr. Ghosn has a pink mansion in an upscale part of town. The Kellys live in an apartment, small but clean, with a microwave but no stove. Ms. Kelly can visit family in the United States, but she spends most of her time with her husband in Tokyo, the person said. Her visa depends on her studying Japanese, so she spends several hours a day in class. If she doesn’t score high enough on the exams, she can be sent home.

While Mr. Ghosn used a corporate jet to visit homes in Brazil, Beirut, Paris and Tokyo before the 2018 arrests, Mr. Kelly led a more pedestrian life as a Nissan executive, according to two people who know him.

A lawyer, Mr. Kelly joined Nissan in 1988, enticed by a recruiter who described “an extremely interesting Japanese company in Tennessee. I think it would a good fit for you,” he recalled last year in an interview with the publication Bungei Shunju.

He and his wife raised a family — two sons — in Brentwood, Tenn., a Nashville suburb near Nissan’s North American headquarters, and Ms. Kelly worked as an accountant. While the children were young, the Kellys were members of the Church of the Good Shepherd, a local Episcopalian congregation, with Dee and their son Mike writing and directing Christmas pageants.

In 2008, their lives changed. Mr. Kelly’s job, as senior executive in Nissan’s human resources department, took him to Japan, and Ms. Kelly came with him. He became a senior vice president and then, in 2012, joined Nissan’s board — Nissan’s first American board member — while working for Mr. Ghosn, the chairman, as the company’s top legal officer.

He was considered a close associate of the chairman, a reliable vote to help Mr. Ghosn carry out his plans for an alliance of Nissan and Renault, the French automaker Mr. Ghosn also headed. But Mr. Kelly has rejected that description, pointing out that he was not on the board’s top decision-making body, the executive committee. “Considering this, why was I called Ghosn’s right-hand man?” he told Bungei Shunju.

The Kellys enjoyed Japan — “Greg and I often discussed the possibility of living in Japan part-time in our retirement,” Ms. Kelly later said — but their lives remained rooted in the United States.

In 2008, they bought a vacation house in Sanibel Island, Fla., in a neighborhood crammed with a network of canals leading to the Gulf of Mexico, according to property documents. They joined a sailing club that organized potlucks at picnic huts on the beach and luncheons at local seafood restaurants.

“You’re dealing with an all-American guy, not extravagant, no racehorses, nothing,” said the second person who knows Mr. Kelly. “Very ordinary guy, and charming, very American in the positive sense of the word.”

Mr. Kelly retired to Tennessee in 2015 but kept his board seat. In November 2018, Mr. Kelly recalled in the interview with Bungei Shunju, a senior executive urged him to attend a board meeting in Japan. Mr. Kelly, facing spinal surgery within two weeks at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said he would prefer to attend via video conference. The official insisted that he come in person, that the company would send a plane to pick him up and that he would be home within three days, in time for Thanksgiving.

Minutes after landing in Tokyo, he was arrested. He spent the next 34 days in a cell at Tokyo Detention House, sleeping on a futon on the floor.

Before he was released on bail on Christmas Day in 2018, Ms. Kelly recorded a video and distributed it news organizations, begging for her husband to be freed or at least to be allowed to consult with a Japanese doctor she had identified as one of the country’s leading experts on Mr. Kelly’s condition. He would eventually undergo surgery in Tokyo for spinal stenosis, but it did not relieve his symptoms.

In September, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission accused Mr. Kelly, along with Mr. Ghosn and Nissan, of breaking American disclosure laws. Mr. Kelly agreed to pay $100,000 and submit to a five-year ban on serving as a senior executive of a public company to settle the charges without admitting or denying guilt.

Prosecutors have barred his lawyers from putting the voluminous documents in his case online and making them searchable, which means that only Mr. Kelly’s Japanese defense team, or others who come to their Tokyo offices, can see them.

Mr. Kelly has insisted on helping to review the mountain of documents prosecutors say they will use to make their case. He spends hours each day at his lawyer’s office.

“Greg has been wrongly accused as part of a power grab by several Nissan executives,” Ms. Kelly said in the video. “The truth of this will come out.”

In the 2019 magazine interview, Mr. Kelly was defiant about his and Mr. Ghosn’s innocence, contending that Hiroto Saikawa, who was then Nissan’s chief executive, approved the compensation plans that led to the arrests. “How come Ghosn and I were suddenly arrested without one instance of being asked to explain and no discussions or meeting on the subject,” he said.

But then Mr. Kelly added, “I am very proud to have worked for this amazing company, Nissan, for over 30 years. It has been an honor.”

Liz Alderman and Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

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2020-01-11 15:43:00Z
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New Law Aims To Help Americans Without Retirement Plans. Will It Work? - NPR

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The Secure Act aims to make it easier for small employers to offer retirement benefits. But some analysts say the new law doesn't go far enough because it's optional and doesn't apply to gig workers. Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

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The most powerful way to get people to save for retirement in recent decades has been through benefits offered at their job. But a lot of people — about half the American workforce — don't get that from their employers.

"Over 50 million workers right now don't have access to any retirement plan at all," says David Certner, legislative counsel for AARP.

Small employers are the biggest segment lacking coverage, he says. That's because many small businesses lack time and money to set such programs up, he says.

The new law, called the Secure Act, aims to help with that in part by allowing smaller employers to band together to share the administrative burden — making it cheaper and easier to offer retirement benefits. How many will do so and expand their retirement benefits is far from clear, because the program is optional.

And, Certner says, the law won't apply to many other workers who aren't classified as employees. That's because they're contractors or gig workers who aren't eligible for those benefits.

The Secure Act also gives people more flexibility to save for longer periods of time and delay withdrawing funds. It also allows employers to offer other investment options like annuities.

The fact that the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support last month is significant, says Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. But she says the changes are modest.

She notes that the government has tried — and largely failed — to encourage more small businesses to offer retirement benefits through programs like the Treasury Department's now-expired myRA program.

She expects it will be the same with this latest law.

"I don't really think they're really going to move the needle much at all," Munnell says.

The new law requires employers offering retirement benefits to include part-time workers who've been on the job at least three years. That could help about 4 million workers, Munnell says.

Much bigger changes to retirement law have been occurring at the state level, experts say. Ten states — including Oregon, California and Illinois — recently started requiring private employers to enroll their workers in individual retirement accounts if the employers don't offer their own benefits. Those state programs are expected to expand retirement savings to 15 million more people.

"Without a mandate, without somebody saying, 'Mr. Small Businessman, you have to do something for your employees,' I don't think we're going to see much change," Munnell says. That's why she says she'd like to see such rules extend to all 50 states.

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2020-01-11 12:48:00Z
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Japan seeks Interpol wanted notice for wife of ex Nissan boss - Reuters

FILE PHOTO: 70th Cannes Film Festival – Screening of the film "L'Amant double" (Amant Double) in competition - Red Carpet Arrivals - Cannes, France. 26/05/2017. Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, and his wife Carole pose. Picture taken May 26, 2017. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese authorities have requested the International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO) for an Interpol wanted notice for the wife of former Nissan Motor (7201.T) boss Carole Ghosn, local media reported on Saturday.

If the notice is issued for his wife, Carole, the couple’s travel chances outside of Lebanon may be restricted, Mainichi newspaper said. Interpol has already issued an arrest warrant for Ghosn.

The request from Japan was made on Thursday, Mainichi and other Japanese media said, quoting unnamed sources.

Officials at the Japanese justice ministry weren’t immediately available for comment.

Japanese prosecutors on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant against Ghosn’s wife for alleged perjury, as officials stepped up efforts to bring the fugitive car industry boss back to face trial on financial misconduct charges.

Ghosn, the former Nissan and Renault (RENA.PA) chairman, fled Japan to Lebanon, his childhood home, last month as he awaited trial on charges of under-reporting earnings, breach of trust and misappropriation of company funds, all of which he denies.

His dramatic escape has raised tensions between Japan and Lebanon, where Ghosn slammed the Japanese justice system at a two-hour news conference on Wednesday, prompting Japan’s Justice Minister to launch a rare and forceful public response.

Lebanon, which has no extradition agreement with Japan, may lift a travel ban on Carlos Ghosn if files pertaining to his case do not arrive from Japan within 40 days, caretaker justice minister Albert Serhan said in a statement on Friday.

Reporting by Yuka Obayashi; Editing by Shri Navaratnam

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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2020-01-11 04:59:00Z
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Dow hits a new record: 29,000 points - CNN

The Dow (INDU) rose as much as 44 points, or 0.2%, to cross 29,000 points, but shortly after, it fell back below the key level. The index fell just short of that mark at Thursday's close, but still finished at a record high.

President Donald Trump tweeted that the Dow had risen 11,000 points since his election, adding "the best is yet to come."

Between election day 2016 and Friday's trading high, stocks gained 10,676 points.

The S&P 500 (SPX), a broader measure of the stock market, was up 0.1%. The Nasdaq Composite (COMP) climbed 0.2%. Both indexes also hit new all-time closing highs Thursday.

It's been a choppy start to the year for stocks: Fears over a military conflict between the United States and Iran weighed on markets over the past several days. Meanwhile, hopes for calmer conditions on the trade front ahead of next week's signing of the "phase one" trade deal between America and China helped boost stocks.

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2020-01-10 15:32:00Z
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Job market ends 2019 with disappointing 145,000 growth in payrolls - CNBC

The U.S. jobs market ended 2019 on a sour note, with December's payroll and wage growth missing expectations, according to Labor Department figures released Friday.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by just 145,000 while the unemployment rate held steady at 3.5%. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for job growth of 160,000. The jobless rate met expectations for staying at a 50-year low.

In addition to the slow payroll growth, average hourly earnings rose by just 2.9%, below the 3.1% projection. December marked the first time that wage gains were below 3% on a year-over-year basis since July 2018.

Revisions to the October and November counts brought those two months down by 14,000 as well. The glittering 266,000 initial estimate for November came down 10,000 while October's fell from 156,000 to 152,000.

Dow futures turned negative following the disappointing report.

Lowest since 1994

On the upside, a separate, more encompassing measure that includes discouraged and underemployed workers fell to 6.7%, the lowest it's ever been in records going back to 1994. The decline came amid a drop of 140,000 in people working part-time for economic reasons.

The labor force participation rate held steady at 63.2% as the workforce rose by 209,000 to 164.6 million and those considered no longer in the job pool fell by 48,000 to 95.6 million.

The total employment level rose to 158.8 million, also a fresh high. However, the unemployment rate for African Americans rose 0.3 percentage points to 5.9%.

For the year, payrolls increased by 2.1 million, an average of 176,000 a month, the slowest year for job creation since 2011 — three years after the start of the financial crisis — and down considerably from the 2.7 million positions added in 2018.

The numbers follow a year of anxiety about a potential recession on the horizon. While fears of an outright downturn have largely been eradicated, recent surveys among corporate executives show a high level of unease about slowing growth.

Manufacturing job declines

Job gains in December came primarily from retail (41,000), leisure and hospitality (40,000) and health care (28,000).

Construction rose by 20,000 and professional and business services saw an increase of 10,000, while manufacturing declined by 12,000, transportation and warehousing lost 10,000 and mining fell by 8,000.

It was a difficult year for manufacturing jobs: The sector saw a net gain of just 46,000 compared with a 264,000 gain the year before. The U.S. and China spent the year locked in a trade battle that saw billions of dollars in tariffs exchanged between the two sides.

The average work week, considered a good indicator for employers' future intentions, held steady at 34.3 hours.

The Labor Department also released its annual revisions to its household survey data, but there were no changes to monthly unemployment rates throughout the year.

Correction: This report was corrected to show that the October job gains fell to 152,000, making the total revisions for October and November down by 14,000.

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2020-01-10 13:30:00Z
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