Renault’s chief executive has offered to give up his bonus after issuing a humiliating apology to three managers sacked after being falsely accused of spying for China.
Carlos Ghosn, who was reportedly due to receive a bonus of €1.6 million (£1.4 million) for 2010, was speaking after the French car group held an emergency board meeting to consider mounting evidence that it had fallen for a scam.
Patrick Pelata, the chief operating officer, will also forgo his bonus, but Mr Ghosn said that he had declined his resignation.The two men are to meet the three dismissed executives to offer them their jobs back or compensation.
Renault could have to pay millions of euros in compensation to each of the managers dismissed for divulging strategic information about its electric vehicle programme.
Renault said in a statement yesterday that Mr Ghosn and Mr Pelata strongly regretted the sackings of Michel Balthazard, vice-chairman of pre-engineering; Bertrand Rochette, head of pre-projects; and Matthieu Tenenbaum, deputy head of Renault’s electric vehicle programme.
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A Renault insider said that Mr Ghosn, who promised to take disciplinary action against security managers, hoped that his personal apology to the trio would be enough to save his job. But other executives, possibly including Mr Pelata, may still be forced to quit.
With prosecutors saying there was no evidence of espionage, unions called for the resignation of Mr Ghosn, whose glittering reputation has been tarnished by the mishandling of the crisis. Maître Thibault de Montbrial, Mr Tenenbaum’s lawyer, said: “My client feels a sense of relief proportionate to the violence of what he has suffered. He is groggy.”
The apology came after Dominique Gevrey, a security manager at Renault, was placed in custody by a French investigating magistrate on suspicion of fraud after being arrested at Paris airport as he was about to board a flight for Guinea in West Africa.
Mr Gevrey, a former intelligence agent, has emerged as a central figure in what Libération described as Renault’s nightmare. His report is understood to have led to the dismissal of the three managers in January after he claimed to have identified their secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. One government minister described the affair as economic warfare, sparking a row with Beijing when China was blamed as the culprit by politicians and media outlets.
But Jean-Claude Marin, the head of the Paris prosecution service, said: “It seems that Renault was not the victim of dishonest employees, but of fraudsters.” He said that the company had paid €310,000 to obtain information about the supposed spy ring, and was preparing to pay a further €400,000. The funds were intended as a payment to Mr Gevrey’s source, who was demanding a total of €924,000 to unveil the espionage.
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However, the executives’ account numbers turned out to be fictitious and Mr Gevrey has refused to identify his source, which detectives believe may never have existed at all. “All the explanations he has provided up to now have turned out to be false or inexact,” Mr Marin claimed.
But Maître Jean-Paul Baduel, Mr Gevrey’s laywer, said: “My client has never taken initiatives on his own. He was doing what he was asked to do.”
The scandal has thrown Mr Ghosn on to the defensive at a time when he is pushing to reduce Renault’s 43.4 per cent stake in Nissan and enable the Japanese carmaker to exercise voting rights corresponding to its 14.5 per cent holding.
Commentators in Paris said the Government, which has a 15 per cent stake in Renault, was likely to give Mr Ghosn short shrift.