‘I would love Carlos Ghosn to be here’

Japanese courts have refused to permit simultaneous translations in Kelly’s hearings, significantly slowing down proceedings. They have repeatedly postponed the start of the case and refused three requests to permit him to return to the US until the hearings started. That is almost certainly because he is considered a flight risk, particularly after Ghosn fled – but Kelly insists he would have come back because he is adamant that he is innocent. 

In another frustration for the defence, prosecutors have provided them with several hundred million pages of electronic documents that can only be viewed on computers in the offices of Kelly’s Japanese defence team in Tokyo. Those documents cannot be shared via email or the internet, while Kelly’s US attorneys are unable to travel to Japan due to coronavirus quarantine regulations and cannot see all the evidence. 

In addition, and despite the case opening, Wareham says the prosecution has still not shared all the evidence with the defence. 

“This trial will be completed and I will still not have been able to review millions of documents because of the restrictions mandated by the prosecutors – and I have never seen that before,” he says. 

And he admits that he has concerns about Kelly receiving a fair trial. 

“He is so demonstrably and fundamentally innocent that I have optimism,” he says. “However, I have been doing this for 34 years and when the principal witness gets in a box and heads to Lebanon, when the prosecution produces more than a billion pages of documents and prevents us from using modern techniques to access that information, and when the pre-trial motions for return to the US, for simultaneous translation and other things are so summarily denied, I have real concerns.”

For his part, Kelly says he had no inkling that Ghosn was planning to flee Japan and, under the terms of his bail, has had no contact with the former Nissan chairman since he left the country.

“Carlos Ghosn is the main witness and he can testify to what I was and what I was not involved in, so I would love to have him here as a witness,” he says.