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According to four persons with firsthand knowledge of the situation, Nissan has opened an investigation into charges made by a top adviser that Chief Executive Makoto Uchida secretly watched his deputy Ashwani Gupta.
In a letter dated April 19 to the independent directors on the board of the Japanese manufacturer, Hari Nada, 58, a senior consultant at Nissan, made the monitoring charges, which were initially published by the Financial Times.
The letter’s specifics have been made public for the first time by Reuters after it was analyzed. They have to do with the allegations of spying, a sharp rift in senior management regarding Nissan’s partnership with Renault and worries about intellectual property transfers to the French automaker.

In the letter, Nada claimed that Uchida had conducted extensive monitoring. According to Nada, the action was made to gain power so that the executive and board members who the chief executive of Nissan saw as a barrier to forging a new agreement with alliance partner Renault might be removed.
According to Nada’s letter and the four people with knowledge of the situation, Gupta, who was named chief operating officer in 2019 and had questioned the parameters of the amended agreement Uchida was attempting to finalize with Renault.
Nissan responded to Reuters’ questions about the spying inquiry by saying, “Independent third parties have been retained to verify the facts and carry out appropriate actions.”

Nissan opted not to comment further on this article.
Who was doing the probe for Nissan was unknown to Reuters. One person with firsthand knowledge of the situation claimed it began in late May.
In the letter, Nada didn’t explain how he learned of the suspected surveillance of Gupta. Reuters was unable to independently verify whether any surveillance was conducted.

ACCUSATION OF HARASSMENT
According to Akira Takeuchi, a lawyer, and certified fraud examiner in Tokyo, a corporation is permitted by Japanese law to monitor communications made on company phones and computers and look into an employee’s behavior away from the office to safeguard its commercial interests.

He stressed that he was not specifically referring to Nissan when he remarked, “In other cases, actions outside the company could be considered private and investigation there could be viewed as excessive.”
Reuters contacted Gupta and Nada, but neither responded with a statement. Uchida, the members of its board of directors, and the other recipients of Nada’s letter were not made available for comment by Nissan.
Other awardees were Nissan’s worldwide general counsel, chief intellectual property officer, and chief human resources officer.
Gupta, 52, who had been widely considered a frontrunner to become chief executive, was informed by Nissan on May 12 that he would not be reappointed to the board when his tenure ended.

Gupta decided to quit Nissan on June 27, the day of the automaker’s annual shareholder meeting, to seek other possibilities, Nissan revealed last week.
In the letter, Nada claimed that during the week of April 10, Nissan evaluated the claims made against Gupta’s conduct and that Gupta had been asked to quit. He stated that he had been informed that the claims against Gupta had been looked into by the Japanese legal firm Anderson Mori & Tomotsune.
According to three sources with firsthand knowledge of the situation, Gupta was the target of an inquiry into a complaint of harassment made by a female employee. According to one source, the complaint was made in March, and the probe was still ongoing when Gupta’s resignation was made public.’

Reuters was unable to independently verify the specifics of the harassment allegation or any of the investigation’s conclusions.
Tomotsune and Anderson Mori declined to comment.

NISSAN SPLIT
The letter’s previously undisclosed revelations highlight how, five years after Nissan’s former CEO Carlos Ghosn was detained on financial charges, including allegedly disguising his income, Nissan is still split over its connections to Renault.
After bailing out Nissan in 1999, Renault sent Ghosn to turn the firm around. Later that year, Ghosn was the driving force behind a strategic alliance in which both companies acquired holdings in one another.

More recently, Nissan and Renault announced new collaboration conditions in February following months of heated negotiations, under which the Japanese manufacturer would acquire a stake of up to 15% in Ampere, an electric vehicle company Renault is spinning out, and Renault would decrease its 43 percent holding in Nissan.
The automakers had hoped to get a formal agreement approved by their boards by the middle of the year, but that deadline has now been pushed out to the end of 2023, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.
According to a person with knowledge of Renault’s position, senior executives at the French automaker, including Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard and Chief Executive Luca de Meo, had believed that Gupta was delaying or obstructing the deal’s completion.

Both officials, according to a Renault representative, declined to comment.
In his letter from April, Nada expressed his opinion that Nissan CEO Uchida had overstepped his bounds by agreeing to what he called “backroom deals” with de Meo. Two instances concerning clauses about Nissan’s intellectual property were presented by Nada.
De Meo also declined to comment, according to a Renault representative.
According to a person with knowledge of the discussions, anything Uchida discussed with his counterpart from Renault would be subject to examination by Nissan’s board with participation from executive committees.

ANTI-RENAULT
In his letter, Nada criticized Uchida for moving forward with the purchase of a share in Ampere without providing a strategic justification and demanded that the acquisition be reviewed by an impartial financial advisor.
If the directors responded to Nada’s request for a review, Reuters was unable to ascertain it.
With this letter, Nada takes on Nissan’s top executive for the second time with the Japanese automaker’s partnership with Renault.
Before his arrest in 2018, Ghosn had been thinking about a complete merger of the businesses. He fled to Lebanon to avoid being tried in Japan and has frequently claimed that Nissan executives, including Nada, were behind the prosecution against him because they were concerned about the possibility of a merger.’

In the linked prosecution of former Nissan director Greg Kelly, Nada, who had cooperated with prosecutors in exchange for not being charged in the Ghosn case, it was stated that he thought a merger with Renault needed to be avoided to defend Nissan’s interests.
Nissan established two executive committees in 2019 as part of a governance overhaul following the Ghosn affair, and Nada is a member of both of them. In his letter, he said that one of those groups had been working on justifications for Nissan’s agreed-upon Ampere investment but had come up empty.

The description of the Ampere investment review made by Nada was not independently verified by Reuters.
Nada also stated that Gupta’s abrupt ouster would act as a message to anybody viewed as challenging or anti-Renault.

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