Investigation claims Credit Suisse handled dirty money

Yahoo – AFP, Erwan LUCAS,  20 February 2022 

Credit Suisse has issued a vigorous denial of the allegations (AFP/FABRICE
COFFRINI) (FABRICE COFFRINI)

Credit Suisse handled billions of dollars in dirty money for decades, an international media investigation based on a massive data leak claimed on Sunday, in the latest setback for Switzerland's second-largest bank. 

The bank held more than $8 billion (seven billion euros) in accounts of criminals, dictators and human rights abusers, among others, according to the investigation by a group comprising dozens of media organisations. 

Credit Suisse rejected the "allegations and insinuations", saying in a statement that many of the issues raised were historical, some dating back more than 70 years. 

According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a non-profit journalism group, the "Suisse Secrets" investigation began when an anonymous source shared bank data with German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung more than a year ago. 

That information, covering accounts collectively worth $100 billion at their highest point, was trawled through by 48 media outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, Le Monde and The Guardian. 

Accounts identified as problematic held over $8 billion in assets, the investigation found. 

The accounts included those held by a Yemeni spy chief implicated in torture, the sons of an Azerbaijani strongman, a Serbian drug lord and bureaucrats accused of looting Venezuela's oil wealth. 

It was the largest leak ever from a major Swiss bank, OCCRP said. 

'Tendentious interpretations' 

The leak included information on more than 18,000 bank accounts, many of which "remained open well into the 2010s", said the OCCRP. 

In its statement Sunday, the bank said: "Credit Suisse strongly rejects the allegations and insinuations about the bank's purported business practices. 

"The matters presented are predominantly historical, in some cases dating back as far as the 1940s, and the accounts of these matters based on partial, inaccurate, or selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank's business conduct." 

About 90 percent of the accounts reviewed were closed -- or were in the process of being closed -- before the press approached the bank, it added. And more than 60 percent of them had been closed before 2015. 

The OCCRP, in a statement on its website, said: "We believe the dozens of examples we have cited raise serious questions about Credit Suisse's effectiveness and commitment to meeting its responsibilities." 

It said the investigation had found dozens of "dubious characters" in the data, including some linked to government officials. 

Among those listed as holding accounts with Credit Suisse were the sons of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah II. 

When asked why so many of these accounts existed, current and former Credit Suisse employees described a work culture that incentivised taking on risk to maximise profits, according to OCCRP. 

"I've too often seen criminals and corrupt politicians who can afford to keep on doing business as usual, no matter what the circumstances, because they have the certainty that their ill-gotten gains will be kept safe and always within their reach," said OCCRP co-founder Paul Radu in a statement. 

A series of setbacks 

The international investigation is the latest in a series of setbacks that Credit Suisse has suffered recently. 

In March 2021, the bank was hit by the collapse of Greensill Capital in which it had committed some $10 billion dollars through four funds. The implosion of the US fund Archegos cost it more than $5 billion. 

And in Switzerland, a former Credit Suisse employee is among the defendants in a major corruption trial that has just started and involves alleged money laundering and organised crime in Bulgaria. The bank has said it will "defend itself vigorously in court". 

Experts say draconian banking secrecy laws in Switzerland effectively silence insiders or journalists who may want to expose wrongdoing within a Swiss bank, according to OCCRP. 

A Swiss media group was unable to participate in the investigation due to the risk of criminal prosecution, the organisation said.

Theory that Coronavirus Escaped from a Lab Lacks Evidence

The pathogen appears to have come from wild animals, virologists say, and there are no signs of genetic manipulation in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

The Scientist, Emily Makowski, Mar 5, 2020

Since the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic, theories have circulated about the origin of the novel coronavirus causing the disease, SARS-CoV-2. One prominent rumor is that it first escaped from a lab in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses and then spread to the public. This theory has also evolved into claims that the virus was genetically engineered to be a bioweapon. But scientists say that while there’s not enough information to pinpoint where the virus came from, there is no evidence that it was created in a lab.

The lab-escape theory had been circulating on social media and various blogs for weeks, but gained considerable visibility in a New York Post article in late February. In it, Steven Mosher, a social scientist and the president of the Population Research Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, summarizes why he believes SARS-CoV-2 may have been accidentally spread by China’s National Biosafety Laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers have studied bat coronaviruses.

In the article, Mosher describes several lines of reasoning, namely, that the lab is less than 10 miles away from the seafood market where a cluster of COVID-19 cases was first discovered, and that after the 2003 SARS outbreak, the SARS-CoV virus escaped from virology labs multiple times in China. He also describes how Chinese virologist and bioweapons expert Major General Chen Wei went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology with military scientists in January to study thenew virus, which Mosher sees as a form of damage control.

“The circumstantial evidence surrounding it is pretty compelling. . . . The idea that the epicenter of this epidemic would be just a few miles from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, which is where we know that dangerous pathogens are being kept and looked at as potential bioweapons, I think the odds against that are just astronomical,” Mosher tells The Scientist.

Dimitrios Paraskevis, an epidemiologist at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, tells The Scientist that while it’s not possible to rule out the idea of lab escape, he believes that it is unlikely. “Any person who works in a lab must follow very strict safety regulations. It sounds to me very extraordinary that something happened and nobody took care about such an accident,” he says. The World Health Organization updated SARS surveillance guidelines in 2004 after the lab-based outbreaks, urging labs to follow proper biosafety procedures, and China replaced the director of its Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

One problem leading to a lot of apprehension and speculation about the new coronavirus is that scientists “don’t know what the actual source of the virus was,” Anthony Fehr, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Kansas, tells The Scientist. Additionally, researchers don’t know if SARS-CoV-2 immediately started to spread in humans after a single transmission from an animal, or if it took multiple zoonotic events between an infected animal population and humans.

Despite the question mark around the exact source of the disease, it does appear to have originally come from wildlife, according to a team of international public health scientists who wrote a statement published in The Lancet. An analysis of SARS-CoV-2 by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology suggests that the virus’s genome is 96 percent similar to a coronavirus found in bats.

Mosher agrees that animals were the likely origin. “That doesn’t mean [the virus] wasn’t collected, brought to the lab, and was being tested on in various ways, and escaped from the lab,” he says. Mosher also does not claim that China genetically engineered the virus. “I’m not saying this has been genetically engineered to be a bioweapon that’s escaped from the lab. . . . I’m just saying that [China is] collecting dangerous pathogens, [and] they have a history of letting them escape from the lab,” he says.

Transmission from an animal, with no lab experiment or genetic manipulation involved, fits best with what scientists know about how other coronaviruses have made the jump to humans. In the past, these viruses have spread through wild bats that infect another type of animal—an intermediate host—that then spreads it to humans. SARS-CoV, for example, was transmitted from bats to civets to humans, while camels were an intermediate host in MERS, according to Quanta. The civet version of SARS-CoV was 99.8 percent similar to the one found in humans—much more closely related than the bat and human varieties of SARS-CoV-2—so researchers believe the new coronavirus also infected another type of animal on its way from bats to humans. But they have not found a candidate so far, according to Nature.

This ability to move in between different animal hosts is a characteristic feature of coronaviruses, according to Paul McCray, a pulmonologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine whose lab studies coronaviruses. “It’s exactly what we’ve learned in studies of SARS in 2002 and 2003, and MERS in 2012. . . . So the concept that this is happening again should come as no surprise,” he says. “For people that work with these viruses, this is completely unsurprising. We don’t need to come up with farfetched theories when the genome sequences and the characteristics of these viruses support what we’re seeing.”

No signs of engineering in SARS-CoV-2 genome

In addition to the claim that a naturally evolved virus escaped from a lab by mistake, some conspiracy theories have posited that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered. In fact, researchers throughout the world, including in the US and China, have conducted research involving the creation of experimentally engineered hybrid coronaviruses. But there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered, says Paraskevis, whose genomic analysis of the new virus was reported as a preprint in January.

RNA viruses, which include coronaviruses, “accumulate mutations at a rate one million times faster than human DNA [does]. . . . It gives them the ability to survive against an immune response,” Paraskevis says. While the new coronavirus does have some genetic differences to other known viruses due to mutations, “there’s no evidence that this is the result of a human experiment,” he says, adding that if the virus were engineered, scientists would expect to see additional genetic material in its genome. For example, an early bioRxiv preprint on SARS-CoV-2 found HIV-like genetic sequences, but online commenters pointed out that “the findings were at most a coincidence” and that research has since been retracted, reports STAT.

As there are still many unknowns about SARS-CoV-2, researchers worldwide are trying to uncover as much as they can about the virus. Chinese researchers “released the genomic sequence incredibly rapidly online. . . . They were very public in sharing the most important first piece of information” about it, McCray tells The Scientist. “The fact that scientists all over the world had access to that genomic sequence” made a lot of early research possible, he says.

Emily Makowski is a freelance writer based in Boston. Find her on Twitter @EmilyRMakowski.

"China is seeking to deflect criticism for its role in starting a global pandemic and not telling the world" by spreading "dangerous and ridiculous" conspiracy theories, a US State Department official said https://t.co/wBxj3p3Sjl pic.twitter.com/myx3OcoixS

— AFP news agency (@AFP) March 13, 2020

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China virus crisis deepens as whistleblower doctor dies

Yahoo – AFP, Laurent THOMET, Jing Xuan TENG, February 7, 2020

Medical staff walks past a makeshift memorial to the late ophthalmologist Li Wenliang
at the Houhu Branch of Wuhan Central Hospital on February 7 (AFP Photo/STR, STR)

Beijing (AFP) - A Chinese doctor punished after raising the alarm about the new coronavirus died Friday after being infected by the pathogen, sparking an outpouring of grief and anger over a worsening crisis that has now killed more than 630 people.

At least 31,000 have been infected by the virus that ophthalmologist Li Wenliang brought to light in late December -- before becoming its latest victim.

The virus is believed to have emerged from a market selling exotic animals in Wuhan before jumping to humans and spreading across China and abroad as millions travelled for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Researchers at the South China Agricultural University have identified the endangered pangolin as a "potential intermediate host" for the disease, as the genome sequences of viruses found on the scaly mammal are 99 percent identical to those on coronavirus patients.

The virus has since spread across China, prompting the government to lock down cities of tens of millions of people, and panic has spiralled around the globe as more than 240 cases have emerged in two dozen countries.

The media keep watch on the Diamond Princess cruise ship with over 3,000 

people on board as it sits in quarantine at Yokohama port (AFP Photo/Kazuhiro NOGI)

Hong Kong, meanwhile, announced it would forcibly quarantine arrivals from mainland China beginning Saturday, warning that anyone caught breaching the new rules faces up to six months in prison.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump, whose countries have tussled over trade and human rights, spoke on the phone about the health emergency.

"We talked about, mostly about the coronavirus. They're working really hard and I think they're doing a very professional job," Trump told reporters at the White House.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday the United States would offer up to $100 million to China and other impacted countries to combat the fast-spreading coronavirus.

Beijing has been angered by bans on arrivals from China instituted by the United States and other countries.

A laboratory technician works on coronavirus samples at "Fire Eye" laboratory 

in Wuhan (AFP Photo/STR, STR)

Li, 34, died early Friday, Wuhan Central Hospital said in a post on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform, an announcement that triggered deep sadness on social media over a doctor hailed as a hero.

"He is a hero who warned others with his life," a fellow Wuhan doctor wrote on Weibo.

There was also a rare collective bout of anger at the authorities and bold demands, including the hashtag "we demand freedom of speech", which was censored.

"Those fat officials who live on public money, may you die from a snowstorm," wrote another Weibo user in a comment that was later scrubbed.

In a sign that the criticism has shaken the Communist government, its anti-graft agency announced that it was sending a team to Wuhan to "conduct a comprehensive investigation into issues involving Dr. Li Wenliang reported by the masses".

A deserted street in Shanghai, as fear of the spread of the virus impacts 

cities across China, even those not in lockdown (AFP Photo/NOEL CELIS)

The foreign ministry and the National Health Commission expressed condolences for his death.

Death censored

Li's death has also highlighted the enormous risks that frontline doctors have taken to treat patients in overwhelmed and under-equipped hospitals in Wuhan, the quarantined city of 11 million people where the virus emerged in December.

Medical staff are overstretched and lack sufficient protective gear, the deputy governor of Hubei province admitted Thursday.

Li sent out a message about the new coronavirus to colleagues on December 30 in Wuhan but was later among a group of people summoned by police for "rumour-mongering".

He later contracted the disease while treating a patient.

Censors appeared to struggle with how to deal with his death.

Striking medical workers demand Hong Kong close the border with China 

to contain the virus (AFP Photo/Philip FONG)

State-run newspaper Global Times and state broadcaster CCTV first reported on Weibo that Li had died late Thursday, only to delete their posts after the death rapidly surged to be among the top topics on the popular platform.

Analysts have said local authorities played down the extent of the outbreak in early January because they were holding political meetings at the time and wanted to project an aura of stability.

The first fatality was reported on January 11. The death toll has since soared to 636, with 73 more reported on Friday and an additional 3,000 new infections.

Global spread

To control the spread, authorities have placed some 56 million people in Wuhan and surrounding cities under virtual lockdown.

Posters warn residents in Beijing to take protective measures against the
coronavirus (AFP Photo/GREG BAKER)

Authorities in Wuhan are "combing" communities to find people suspected or confirmed to have the virus and place them in quarantine, state media said.

Major airlines have suspended flights to and from the country, while several countries have advised their citizens to leave China.

But cases keep emerging.

Two cruise ships carrying thousands of holidaymakers in Hong Kong and Japan have been placed under quarantine as authorities test people for infections.

On Friday another 41 people tested positive aboard the Diamond Princess in Japan, bringing the total number of infected cases on the ship to 61.

Timeline of events leading to the death of coronavirus whistleblower 

Chinese doctor Li Wenliang. (AFP Photo/Gal ROMA)

Another cruise ship carrying a passenger suspected of infection with coronavirus will not be allowed to dock in southern Japan, the government said Friday.

In Hong Kong, 3,600 people are facing a third night confined aboard the World Dream, where eight former passengers have tested positive for the virus.

While global concerns mount, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that that world was facing a "chronic shortage" of masks and other protective equipment.

Apple contractor Foxconn said Friday it would start making face masks alongside iPhones at its Shenzhen factory, aiming for 20 million by the end of February.

At least 31,000 have been infected by the virus that ophthalmologist Li Wenliang 

brought to light in late December -- before becoming its latest victim

The death of a whistleblowing doctor who was reprimanded for warning about the new coronavirus has sparked rare calls for political reform and free speech in China https://t.co/sSQVtqwdDy

— AFP news agency (@AFP) February 9, 2020

Whistleblowers: What does US law say about them?

Yahoo – AFP, October 6, 2019

Acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire told Congress he was acting
within the law when he opted not to forward a whistleblower complaint to lawmakers
(AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski)

Washington (AFP) - At least two, and possibly more, US officials with knowledge of the impeachment allegations against President Donald Trump have formally sought the protections that US law affords whistleblowers, according to their lawyers.

Both whistleblowers are said to be members of the US intelligence community, which has its own strict set of requirements to obtain protected status.

A narrow legal path

Passed by Congress in 1998 and amended in 2010, the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act established specific procedures for employees to follow in reporting conduct that relates to classified information.

The whistleblower is protected from retaliation, including firing, provided that he or she follows the narrowly defined protocol.

Any whistleblower must signal his or her complaint to the inspector general of the intelligence community, who has 14 days to review it.

If it is deemed credible and of "urgent concern," the complaint is then forwarded to the director of national intelligence, who oversees the nation's intelligence services.

"Urgent concern" is defined as "a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, violation of law or executive order, or deficiency relating to the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity ... involving classified information, but does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters."

The DNI then has a week to forward the complaint and any additional information to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The Ukraine call

On August 12, a member of the intelligence community -- a CIA officer, according to The New York Times -- filed a complaint about a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The complaint signaled an issue of "urgent concern" -- namely, that the "President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election."

Inspector General Michael Atkinson deemed the complaint credible and forwarded it to acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire.

But after consulting with the Justice Department and White House attorneys, Maguire -- recently named to his post by Trump -- concluded that he was not obligated to inform Congress, saying the complaint fell short of the bar.

Atkinson did inform lawmakers of the complaint's existence, however, but not its content, setting off a struggle between the House Intelligence Committee and the administration.

On September 25, that struggle was resolved when the complaint was released by the director of national intelligence to the Intelligence Committee, which made it public the following day.

A second whistleblower has since come forward, according to their lawyers, who said on October 6 that this one has first-hand knowledge of the events in question.

"They also made a protected disclosure under the law and cannot be retaliated against," Mark Zaid, the informant's lawyer, said on Twitter.

The second complaint has not been released.

Executive privilege

The president's right to withhold information on the basis of executive privilege has been a sticking point between Congress and the White House since the intelligence whistleblower law first took effect in 1998.

Former president Bill Clinton, who signed the law, said at the time that it did not "constrain" his "constitutional authority" to review and control disclosure of classified information to Congress, noted Robert Litt, a former general counsel to the Office of the DNI, on the Lawfare blog.

Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a former White House counsel, has said that executive privilege should prevail in these circumstances.

But after initially resisting, the White House has opted for disclosure, releasing a rough transcript of the president's Ukraine call on September 25, the day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched an impeachment inquiry.

The original whistleblower complaint was made public on September 26.

Whistleblowers making their mark on business world

Yahoo – AFP, Valentin BONTEMPS, 22 November 2018

Whistleblowers are increasingly exposing wrongdoing by companies and 

their top managers

UBS, Danske Bank, Cambridge Analytica and now Renault-Nissan: the probe into Carlos Ghosn demonstrates the growing power of whistleblowers as transparency requirements tighten in the corporate world.

Ghosn, who is suspected of having under-reported his income by half between June 2011 to June 2015, was arrested at the beginning of the week by Japanese authorities.

While some information about who pointed the finger at Ghosn is beginning to emerge, the whistleblower's motive remains unclear.

According to Japanese media, the he or she works in Nissan's legal affairs service.

Jenny Corbett, a researcher at the Foundation for Australia-Japan Studies, said "it's unusual because the culture of whistleblowing isn't very well established in Japan".

This, she said, may "suggest there's some kind of internal tensions or struggle for power within the company".

For Patrick Wiedloecher at the French Business Ethics Club, the motivations of the Nissan employee, which could be either personal or political, don't distract from the person's status as a whistleblower -- if the allegations turn out to be true.

"There are many different motivations for whistleblowers. Sometimes they act to defend the common interest, sometimes to protect themselves, sometimes for personal revenge," said the former ethics officer for France's postal service.

He believes it is also part of a much larger phenomenon hitting the business world.

Former UBS Group AG banker Bradley Birkenfeld, who as a whistleblower helped 

US authorities prosecute the Swiss bank for tax fraud

'Tidal wave'

In recent years there have been numerous cases of employees denouncing illegal practices.

A decade ago UBS was stung by one of its American employees denouncing how the Swiss bank helped US citizens evade taxes.

In 2014 whistleblowers provided information on how Luxembourg was providing sweetheart tax deals to multinationals, which allowed them to avoid paying taxes in other countries.

This year, whistleblowers disclosed how Cambridge Analytica misused the personal information of Facebook users and how hundreds of billions of suspect dollars passed through the tiny Estonian branch of Danske Bank.

"There is a tidal wave on the international level" driven by a desire to "battle against an abuse of power" said Nicole-Marie Meyer, who handles anti-corruption affairs at Transparency International France.

"Political and economic leaders are increasing being held to account by citizens," she added.

'Nothing remains hidden'

A study published last year by the Freshfields Bruckaus Deringer law firm that surveyed 2,500 people in the United States, Asia and Europe, found that one out of every two executives had been involved in whistleblowing cases, either by spilling the beans on their own initiative or after being alerted by a whistleblower.

Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica and its abuse

 of Facebook's data privacy provisions

"Today, nothing remains hidden for long -- information circulates very quickly," said Widloecher.

"The market economy is an economy built on confidence. Companies have to inspire confidence or they are at the mercy of their competitors," he added.

A recent study in the Harvard Business Review found that whistleblowers were in fact a sign of a healthy company that had good internal conflict resolution procedures and a desire to reduce risks.

"Companies that more actively use their internal reporting systems can identify and address problems internally before litigation becomes likely," said the study by Stephen Stubben and Kyle Welch.

Their study also found that such companies were also typically more profitable, with fewer lawsuits and less legal settlement amounts.

Auto titan Ghosn under arrest, faces ouster at Nissan

Yahoo – AFP, Natsuko FUKUE, November 19, 2018

Nicknamed "Le Cost Killer", Carlos Ghosn has turned around Nissan and Renault
but now faces arrest (AFP Photo/VANDERLEI ALMEIDA)

Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn faces being fired this week after being arrested in Japan over allegations of financial misconduct, the firm said Monday, in a stunning fall from grace for one of the world's best-known businessmen.

Ghosn's arrest and his likely dismissal from Nissan, as well as possibly from Mitsubishi and Renault, sent shockwaves through the auto industry, where he is a towering figure, credited with turning around several major manufacturers.

Besides being chairman of Nissan, the 64-year-old is also CEO of Renault and leads the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance.

Nissan's board will meet Thursday to decide his fate, and Mitsubishi said it would propose he be dismissed as chairman "promptly." Renault said its board would meet "shortly", after Ghosn was detained over allegations including underreporting his income.

At a hastily organised press conference, Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa expressed "despair," but also suggested that Ghosn had accrued too much power and eluded proper oversight.

"Too much authority was given to one person in terms of governance," he told reporters at Nissan's headquarters in Yokohama.

"I have to say that this is a dark side of the Ghosn era which lasted for a long time."

The news of Ghosn's downfall emerged unexpectedly on Monday evening, with local media first reporting he was being questioned by prosecutors and that Nissan's headquarters was being raided.

Shortly afterwards, Nissan said in a statement that it had been investigating Ghosn and Representative Director Greg Kelly for months after a whistleblower report.

French President Emmanuel Macron, seen here with Ghosn at a Renault factory 

visit this month, said his government would be 'extremely vigilant' about the 

automaker's stability (AFP Photo/ludovic MARIN)

"These two gentleman are arrested this evening, that's what I understand," Saikawa said at the press conference.

He said the company had uncovered years of financial misconduct including under-reporting of income and inappropriate personal use of company assets.

Saikawa gave few details about the nature of the improprieties, including refusing to confirm reports that Ghosn under-reported his income by 5 billion yen, or around $44 million, over five years from 2011.

He said an ongoing investigation limited what details could be shared, and refused to be drawn on whether other people were involved, saying only: "These two gentlemen are the masterminds, that is definite."

A Japanese judicial source told AFP that Ghosn could legally be held for up to 23 days but would possibly be freed on bail before then.

News of his arrest caused Renault shares to fall 8.43 percent in Paris trading. The reports emerged after the trading day was over in Tokyo.

The apparent disintegration of Ghosn's career raises questions about the alliance of the three car companies, which the Brazil-born executive was often believed to be holding together personally.

Saikawa insisted "the partnership among the three entities will not be affected by this event," but he was unable to give details on how Renault and Mitsubishi planned to respond, or who might succeed Ghosn.

Ghosn has been regarded as the glue holding together the sprawling alliance 

of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, and questions have been raised in the 

past about how his eventual departure might affect the coalition (AFP

 Photo/Behrouz MEHRI)

'Man of charisma'

French President Emmanuel Macron warned Paris would be "extremely vigilant" about the stability of Renault and the three-firm alliance after Ghosn's arrest. France owns a 15 percent stake in Renault.

Speaking on the sidelines of a eurozone finance ministers' meeting in Brussels, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said the government would "do everything as a shareholder represented on Renault's board to ensure operational continuity and stable governance at Renault".

Ghosn's arrest will "rock the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance as he is the keystone of the alliance," said Satoru Takada, an analyst at TIW, a Tokyo-based research and consulting firm.

"He is the man of charisma for the alliance. It is likely to have a negative impact on its brand image," he told AFP.

"It's the future of the alliance that seems in play, because the thing holding it together seemed to be Ghosn himself," said Daniel Larrouturou, a senior executive at investment firm Diamant Bleu Gestion.

The arrest is an astonishing reversal of fortune for Ghosn, often feted for his success at turning around failing companies with hard-nosed tactics that earned him the nickname "Le Cost Killer" in France.

Renault came to the rescue of the then-ailing Japanese automaker Nissan in 1999 and parachuted in Ghosn, who set about slashing costs and jobs in a huge corporate overhaul.

In 2016, Ghosn also took charge at troubled Mitsubishi after Nissan threw it a lifeline, buying a one-third stake for about $2.2 billion as it wrestled with a mileage-cheating scandal that hammered sales.

He is credited with saving Nissan from bankruptcy through measures including closing plants and restructuring, and he has instant name recognition in Japan, where he is a rare high-profile foreign executive.

But he has also faced opposition, including over his pay, with his compensation package at Renault prompting a spat with shareholders and criticism from France's then-economy minister Macron.

In February he was forced to accept a 30 percent pay cut from the 7.25 million euros ($8.3 million) he took home as Renault CEO last year.

Saikawa said he was still thinking through whether Ghosn was "a charismatic figure or a tyrant."

"But looking at the facts he has done what not many other people could have done," he added, referring to Ghosn's overhauls of companies.

#UPDATE Nissan board members have voted unanimously to sack Carlos #Ghosn as chairman, a spectacular fall from grace for the once-revered boss whose arrest for financial misconduct stunned the car industry and the business world https://t.co/05djM9Xmt4 pic.twitter.com/94UghNazOZ

— AFP news agency (@AFP) November 22, 2018