Fierce clashes among Nissan Motor Co.’s top executives have forced the ouster of an executive who had been nominated to be the next president, as the Japanese automaker faces its biggest governance crisis since the ouster of Carlos Ghosn in 2018 .
Chief Operating Officer Ashwani Gupta is leaving, four people with direct knowledge of the situation said, after months of internal turmoil that has been agreed, eliminating Nissan’s quest to rebalance its alliance with France’s Renault. One of the most vocal opponents of the league’s terms.
The prolonged infighting has undermined the automakers’ efforts to salvage their partnership at a time when rivals are investing heavily in electric vehicles and self-driving technology.
Last month, Nissan shocked investors by announcing that Gupta would not be renominated to the board. He will officially leave within days, according to people familiar with the matter.
Gupta agreed to resign after Motoo Nagai, the full-time outside director in charge of Nissan’s audit committee, filed multiple internal complaints with Gupta, one of which was nearly a year old, they said.
Some of the complaints were not investigated when they were first filed, but appear to have resurfaced in April as part of a campaign to orchestrate Gupta’s departure, the people said.
Two Nissan executives claimed Gupta had been “framed,” but other people familiar with the matter said the committee acted immediately after the complaint was formally filed through an internal hotline.
Gupta declined to comment. “An independent third party has been engaged to verify the facts and take appropriate action,” Nissan said in a statement. Nagai and Nissan Chief Executive Makoto Uchida declined further comment when contacted through the company.
Since Uchida and Gupta took over Nissan management in late 2019, group insiders have described intense competition between the two executives.
While Uchida initially kept a low profile, Gupta did not hide his ambitions for the top job and was widely seen within Nissan to occasionally step beyond his role as chief operating officer in ways that were seen as damaging to his boss.
The 52-year-old Indian executive has also long been seen by Renault executives as one of the biggest hurdles in negotiations between alliance partners. Gupta has been opposed to France’s demands for concessions in exchange for reducing its stake in Nissan.
Nissan’s nominating committee also last month declined to renominate two non-executive directors, including nominating committee chairman Akikazu Toyoda.
Along with Gupta, Toyoda opposed the Japanese group’s takeover of a minority stake in Renault’s electric car spinoff Ampere. The two also pushed to ensure Nissan would not share its intellectual property with Renault unless the stake in the alliance was split equally.
After long and difficult negotiations, Nissan agreed in February to acquire a minority stake in Ampere as part of a basic agreement between the two companies to balance their stakes in the 24-year-old alliance. The deal was aimed at convincing both parties that their partnership could continue without former chairman Ghosn, who was arrested in 2018 on financial misconduct charges he has denied.
The departures of Gupta and Toyoda are now expected to smooth the deal, people close to the companies said.
Toyoda’s departure comes after former Nissan internal legal chief Hari Nada, who played a central role in Ghosn’s ouster, sent a letter to all independent directors in April.
Nada, now a senior adviser, said in the letter that the Nissan CEO and Nagai had been monitoring Gupta for months. People with direct knowledge of the details of the letter, which described its contents to the Financial Times, said Uchida was organizing staff around Gupta to provide information that could be used against him.
Toyoda called for closer scrutiny of the internal complaint against Gupta and the allegations made by Nada in the letter. Some independent directors tried to launch an investigation led by Akio Toyoda, but Nagai, who heads the audit committee, commissioned a separate investigation from a law firm, two people familiar with the matter said.
The investigation said Toyoda lacked independence because of his significant interference with management issues and his apparent access to classified information before it was presented to the board. A person close to Toyoda denied that he had access to classified information.
In the nominating committee, two members voted against removing Toyoda from the board, while Nagai, Renault chairman Jean-Dominique Senard and another non-executive director voted in favor.
Toyoda and Renault declined to comment. Nada could not be reached for comment.