Ashwani Gupta, a top Nissan official, is leaving the company, the Japanese carmaker revealed on Friday. The news came a day after it was said that there was a leadership dispute inside the company.
Concerns about the security of Nissan’s leadership, which has been in turmoil since Carlos Ghosn was arrested in 2018 for financial wrongdoing, will be brought up again by his exit.
Nissan said that Gupta, the company’s chief operating officer, had “decided to leave the company to pursue other opportunities as of June 27.” They did not say why he was leaving, though.
The company also said that on the same date, a new set of executives will be named.
The news came a day after a source told AFP that Gupta, who is from India and is 52 years old, was going. The source said that the “rivalry” between Gupta and Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida was one reason.
“It was clear that he wanted to be in charge. The person said, “He wasn’t kicked out, but he knew it wasn’t going to work.”
The Financial Times was the first to report Gupta’s sudden exit on Thursday. It said that Uchida and Gupta had had disagreements and that Gupta was sometimes seen as going beyond his job and harming the company’s leader.
The newspaper also said that Gupta was the subject of “multiple internal complaints,” but it didn’t say what those complaints were about.
Nissan didn’t say anything about the news that Gupta was leaving on Thursday. Instead, they said, “Independent third parties have been hired to verify facts and take appropriate actions.”
Nissan and Renault signed a deal earlier this year to fix their rocky 24-year partnership. This came after months of hard-fought talks and repeated delays.
Under the deal, Renault will reduce its stake in Nissan, and Nissan will invest up to 15% in Renault’s new electric car business, Ampere.
The Financial Times said that Renault officials had long seen Gupta as “one of the biggest obstacles in negotiations between the alliance partners” because he always turned down the French company’s requests.
Nissan has had a hard time getting back on its feet since Ghosn’s arrest, which shook the company to its core and led to internal probes that led to the CEO also stepping down.
Ghosn left Japan while he was out on bail, and he is now on the run in Lebanon. He says he didn’t do anything wrong and ran away because he didn’t think he would get a fair hearing.
