BEIRUT—Days after fleeing Japan, Carlos Ghosn is mounting a pointed counterattack on Japanese authorities and Nissan Motor Co., aiming to unravel their case against him.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the former auto executive tried to reclaim some of the stature he had lost since Japanese authorities threw him in jail in late 2018. Speaking from a corner office overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, Mr. Ghosn acknowledged he has a long way to go in rebuilding his reputation and seeking retribution from his former employer.
“I know that the task is far from finished,” Mr. Ghosn said as his wife, Carole Ghosn, who had been barred from any contact with him in Japan, sat nearby.
Mr. Ghosn lashed out at the Japanese justice system as unfair and said he should have left Nissan years ago.
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“I regret that I didn’t take the job of General Motors. That’s my real regret,” Mr. Ghosn said Friday. He was referring to an incident more than a decade ago when he was asked about his interest in running the U.S. auto maker, as recounted in a book by Steven Rattner, chief architect of GM’s bailout under the Obama administration.
Mr. Ghosn also attacked the basis of the first charge Japanese prosecutors brought against him after his arrest in late 2018 at a Tokyo airport: He was accused of understating his compensation on several years of Nissan’s financial reports, an allegation he denies.
It was Nissan executives—and not he—who first came up with the idea of paying him tens of millions of dollars in deferred compensation without disclosing it to the public, he said.
Mr. Ghosn said his subordinates started brainstorming ideas around 2010 to pay him more than what the company was revealing publicly, because they were worried he might take a job at a competitor. Mr. Ghosn had taken a pay cut that year after Japan passed a law requiring Nissan and other publicly traded companies to disclose top executives’ salaries.
“I was listening to a lot of proposals, but none of these proposals were put into action because at the end of the day, the real test was: Are they legal?” said Mr. Ghosn, the former chief of the Renault-Nissan alliance. “As some of them were not legal—or were limit legal—we decided not to pursue them.”
Tokyo prosecutors charged Mr. Ghosn with failing to report ¥9.2 billion ($83 million) in deferred compensation over eight years of Nissan’s financial statements. In the U.S. last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Mr. Ghosn had considered one plan that involved awarding him consulting fees in future years when he retired.
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“If you find a way to be paid more money, then you get up and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to pay this way, but we didn’t find anything and nothing was paid.’ So I don’t know what’s the problem,” Mr. Ghosn said Friday.
Nissan agreed to pay a $15 million civil penalty to settle charges with the SEC that the auto maker and Mr. Ghosn had filed false financial disclosures omitting more than $140 million slated to be paid to Mr. Ghosn in retirement, the U.S. agency said in September. In a separate settlement, Mr. Ghosn agreed to a $1 million civil penalty. Both parties settled without admitting or denying the allegations.
Mr. Ghosn on Friday said a group of Nissan executives had told him they were willing to do “whatever it takes” to keep him. He said they included Greg Kelly, a close aide to Mr. Ghosn, and Hiroto Saikawa, Nissan’s chief executive at the time of Mr. Ghosn’s arrest.
A person close to Nissan said company executives generally don’t believe Mr. Ghosn was underpaid. “Mr. Ghosn wanted more money all the time and made plans to get it. We know what he did, and we have done an investigation that shows exactly what he did,” the person said.
Mr. Kelly was also arrested in Japan and charged related to the plans to pay Mr. Ghosn deferred compensation, and he remains on bail in Tokyo awaiting trial. Jamie Wareham, Mr. Kelly’s U.S. lawyer, said that “no plan to compensate Mr. Ghosn, and which required additional disclosures, was ever consummated.” Mr. Saikawa didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Ghosn said he decided to take the pay cut in 2010 because he worried that the disclosure of a higher salary might hurt morale at the Japanese auto maker.
“Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not,” Mr. Ghosn said. “But what I can tell you: I didn’t order people to say, ‘Hey, let’s find a way how you’re going to get all this money back.’ This is absolutely untrue.”
Mr. Ghosn was speaking Friday just days after he fled Japan in an escape operation that involved him being smuggled onto a private jet in a box for concert equipment. The former executive forfeited nearly $14 million by violating the terms of his bail.
On Friday, Mr. Ghosn said he couldn’t discuss the details of his escape for fear of getting the people who helped him in trouble.
Earlier this week, a Japanese court issued an arrest warrant for Carole Ghosn, his wife, on suspicion of perjury. A family spokeswoman called the move “pathetic.”
Japanese authorities barred Mr. Ghosn from having contact with his wife while he was living in the country. Cameras were trained on the front door of his house in Tokyo, and Mr. Ghosn wasn’t allowed to use a computer connected to the internet except at his lawyer’s office. He was required to keep a record of everyone he called.
“They knew that Carole was important for me, and that they wanted to break me,” Mr. Ghosn said.
The former auto executive also renewed his criticism of Japan’s court system and its unusually high conviction rate.
“I don’t think a system in which 99.4% of people are convicted is viable in a democracy. Maybe it’s viable in North Korea,” he said.
Mr. Ghosn has filed a lawsuit seeking €15 million in damages from Nissan over its decision to oust him as head of its Netherlands-based alliance with Mitsubishi Motors Corp. Nissan didn’t respond to a response for comment on the lawsuit.
Earlier this week, he also accused Renault SA of unfairly withholding some of his compensation, because he didn’t step down from all of his roles at the auto maker last year.
“They’re going to owe me much more than what they think,” he said of Nissan. Renault has said previously that Mr. Ghosn resigned as chairman and CEO in January 2019. A company spokesman declined to comment further.
—Sean McLain contributed to this article.
Write to Nick Kostov at Nick.Kostov@wsj.com
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