TOKYO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th January, 2020) Tokyo Prosecutor's Office is looking into reports about a possible involvement of former US Army Special Forces officer Michael Taylor in an escape of ex-CEO of carmaker Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, from Japan ahead of his trial on financial misconduct charges, Japanese media reported on Friday.
Earlier in the week, media reported that Ghosn's escape could have been organized by US citizen Michael Taylor.
According to the Kyodo news agency, Taylor joined the Green Berets after high school and sent to Lebanon in 1982. At the end of the service, he returned to Lebanon and married a Lebanese resident. In 1994, he founded a private security company in the US state of Massachusetts and participated in the operation to release a New York Times reporter from the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2009. In 2012, he was sentenced to 14 months in prison for bribing a military man.
The Japanese prosecutors are also checking the involvement of Ghosn's other possible accomplice, George Zayek, who had worked with Taylor for over 10 years and provided security services to support US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources familiar with the case told the agency. Zayek was born in Lebanon and, like Ghosn, belongs to the Christian community in this country.
According to one source, cited by Kyodo, Ghosn, Taylor and Zayek met on the afternoon of December 29 at a hotel in Tokyo's Roppongi district, from where all three went to the Shinagawa railroad station. There, they took a high-speed train to Shin-Osaka Station, after which they checked in a hotel located near Kansai International Airport.
According to the same source, two large boxes, one of which was used to smuggle Ghosn out of Japan, were delivered to the hotel even before the US nationals checked in it. After some time, Taylor and Zayek left the hotel and took the boxes to the airport, where they were loaded onto a private plane.
Ghosn, a Brazilian-born French businessman of Lebanese origin, was arrested in Tokyo in November 2018. Since April 2019, Ghosn had been held on house arrest under close surveillance, awaiting trial, which was expected to be held later this year. However, on New Year's eve, he issued a statement, saying that he had arrived in his home country of Lebanon. It remains unknown how he sidestepped the Japanese law enforcement and crossed international borders without any of his Brazilian, French and Lebanese passports.
On Thursday, a court in Lebanon banned Ghosn from leaving the country after Lebanese prosecutors received an Interpol "red notice" for the businessman's arrest. However, a source in Lebanon's Palace of Justice told Sputnik that the temporary travel ban for Ghosn was merely a standard procedure. According to the source, Ghosn's extradition is ruled out, as the Lebanese law does not allow the extradition of its citizens to another country.
