Nissan’s internal leadership clash forces top executive’s exit

A bitter clash among the top leadership of Nissan has forced out an executive previously tipped as its next president, as the Japanese carmaker suffers its biggest crisis of governance since the 2018 ousting of Carlos Ghosn.

The impending departure of chief operating officer Ashwani Gupta, which four people with direct knowledge of the situation said was agreed after months of internal turmoil, removes one of the strongest opponents of the terms under which Nissan is seeking to rebalance its alliance with France’s Renault.

Chronic infighting has undermined the two carmakers’ efforts to salvage their partnership at a time when rivals are investing massively in electric vehicles and autonomous driving technology.

Last month, Nissan stunned investors by announcing that Gupta would not be renominated to its board. His official departure from the company is now set to be announced in days, according to the people with knowledge of the situation.

They said Gupta agreed to step down after Motoo Nagai, a full-time outside director who heads Nissan’s audit committee, presented him with multiple internal complaints, one of which was almost a year old.

Some complaints were not investigated when they were first made, but they appeared to resurface in April as part of a campaign to engineer Gupta’s departure, the people said.

Two Nissan executives claimed Gupta was “framed”, but other people familiar with the situation said the committee promptly acted on the complaints when they were formally submitted through an internal hotline.

Gupta declined to comment. In a statement, Nissan said: “Independent third parties have been retained to verify facts and carry on appropriate actions.” Nagai and Nissan chief executive Makoto Uchida declined to comment further when contacted through the company.

Since Uchida and Gupta took the reins of Nissan’s management in late 2019, people inside the group have described a fierce rivalry between the two executives.

While Uchida initially kept a low profile, Gupta did not hide his ambitions for the top position and was widely seen within Nissan as occasionally overstepping his role as chief operating officer in ways seen as undermining his boss.

The 52-year-old Indian executive has also long been viewed within the senior echelons of Renault as one of the biggest obstacles in negotiations between the alliance partners. Gupta consistently objected to concessions demanded by the French side in return for reducing its stake in Nissan.

Nissan’s nomination committee last month also declined to renominate two non-executive directors, including Masakazu Toyoda, the nomination committee’s chair.

Along with Gupta, Toyoda opposed the Japanese group taking a minority stake in Ampere, Renault’s electric vehicle spin-off. The two also pushed to ensure Nissan would not share its intellectual property with Renault unless the stakes in the alliance were equalised.

After long and fraught negotiations, Nissan agreed to take a minority stake in Ampere in February as part of a basic agreement between the two companies to equalise their stakes in the 24-year-old alliance. The deal was intended to convince both sides their partnership could survive without former chair Ghosn, who was arrested in 2018 on financial misconduct charges that he has denied.

People close to both companies said the departures of Gupta and Toyoda were now expected to make implementation of the deal smoother.

Toyoda’s departure came after Hari Nada — a former Nissan in-house legal chief who played a central role in Ghosn’s ousting — sent a letter to all the independent directors in April.

In the letter Nada, who is currently senior adviser, alleged that the Nissan CEO and Nagai had placed Gupta under surveillance for months. The letter, whose contents have been described to the Financial Times by people with direct knowledge of its details, claimed Uchida was organising employees around Gupta to supply information that could be used against him.

Toyoda called for closer scrutiny of the internal complaints that were made against Gupta and the allegations raised in Nada’s letter. Some independent directors sought to set up an investigation led by Toyoda, but two people with knowledge of the situation said Nagai, the audit committee head, commissioned a separate probe by a law firm.

That investigation alleged that Toyoda lacked independence because of his heavy interference in management issues and his apparent access to confidential information before it was presented to the board. A person close to Toyoda denied that he had access to confidential information.

Among the nomination committee, two members voted against removing Toyoda from the board, while Nagai, Renault chair Jean-Dominique Senard and another non-executive director voted in favour.

Toyoda and Renault declined to comment. Nada could not be reached for comment.