Japan Defends Its Justice System After Carlos Ghosn’s Flight

TOKYO — Japanese officials on Sunday said they would tighten immigration procedures and defended the country’s justice system, as they broke their silence on Carlos Ghosn’s dramatic and mysterious escape from Tokyo last week.

In a statement issued near the end of the country’s weeklong New Year’s holiday, Masako Mori, Japan’s justice minister, said officials would investigate how Mr. Ghosn, the former automotive executive, fled the country. She said Japanese officials would tighten the processes through which people leave the country, without disclosing details.

“Since no record has been found that he left Japan, he may have left the country using illegal measures,” she said in the statement. “It’s truly regrettable.”

Takahiro Saito, deputy chief prosecutor for the city of Tokyo, said in a separate statement on Sunday that Mr. Ghosn “broke his own word” by jumping bail and leaving Japan.

Mr. Saito said Mr. Ghosn, who faced criminal charges of financial wrongdoing, would have received a fair and open trial, countering Mr. Ghosn’s intense criticism of the country’s justice system.

“The act can never be justified,” Mr. Saito said.

The comments marked the first public response by the Japanese government since Mr. Ghosn escaped to Lebanon early last week. Mr. Ghosn, the former chief of Nissan, the Japanese automaker, has long maintained his innocence, saying he was set up by underlings who worried that he would essentially combine one of the crown jewels of Japan’s auto industry with its French partner, Renault.

Mr. Ghosn’s flight from Japan has put a global spotlight on the Japanese justice system, where prosecutors win 99 percent of their cases and have broad powers to detain and interview suspects outside the presence of their lawyers.

Before he made bail, Mr. Ghosn, 65, was held in solitary confinement with limited access to his lawyers. Once released, he was not allowed to meet with his wife, and was forbidden to use the internet outside his lawyers’ offices. Surveillance cameras watched him come and go from his Tokyo residence.

People familiar with his thinking said he had grown increasingly alarmed over the possibility that he could spend the rest of his life facing charges in Japan, as Japanese prosecutors sought to try him on his four charges of financial wrongdoing in stages, rather than all at once.

Mr. Saito on Sunday defended the system. He said that Mr. Ghosn had been guaranteed a swift trial in an open court, and that prosecutors must prove their allegations beyond a reasonable doubt to win a conviction.

Conviction rates are high in Japan, Mr. Saito acknowledged in his statement. But he said that “I’m confident that fair trials are carried out in which the courts allow defendants to make their claims adequately, and can judge from a strictly independent stance whether cases have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“In this case,” he added, “prosecutors have been implementing the appropriate procedures as stipulated by the law and have been proceeding with the investigation and preparation for trials while guaranteeing the rights of Ghosn, the defendant.”

Mr. Saito also defended the strict limits on Mr. Ghosn’s conduct while he was on bail, citing his personal wealth and his connections both in Japan and around the world.

“As Ghosn has ample funds and a number of bases abroad, it was easy to escape,” he said. “He also has various human networks and a huge amount of influence both inside and outside Japan, so there was a realistic danger of concealing and destroying the evidence.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Ghosn issued a statement saying he had fled to Lebanon, where he was largely raised, and “will no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant, and basic human rights are denied, in flagrant disregard of Japan’s legal obligations under international law and treaties it is bound to uphold.

“I have not fled justice — I have escaped injustice and political persecution,” it said.

How Mr. Ghosn eluded Japanese authorities remains mostly a mystery. Local media outlets have reported that surveillance cameras showed him leaving his rental home in a well-to-do neighborhood in central Tokyo by himself on Dec. 29.

After that, media reports have said, he boarded a private jet in Osaka and flew to Istanbul, where he boarded a second plane and flew to Beirut.

The New York Times, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Friday that Mr. Ghosn was accompanied out of Japan by an American security consultant named Michael Taylor, a former Green Beret. Turkish media outlets have reported that Mr. Taylor and another American were the only people listed as passengers on a manifest for the flight that carried Mr. Ghosn from Japan to Turkey.

On Friday, MNG Jet, an aircraft charter company, said one of its employees had falsified records to remove Mr. Ghosn’s name from the official documentation for two flights.

Mr. Ghosn was once hailed as a corporate hero in Japan for the way he turned around Nissan. Born in Brazil to parents of Lebanese descent and educated in France, Mr. Ghosn in 1999 was assigned by Renault to turn around Nissan, in which the French company had bought a sizable stake. Mr. Ghosn slashed costs at Nissan, turning it into a success and making him one of the most visible executives in the auto industry.