Escape (10)
Chairman Samara’s escape was the worst humiliation in the history of the Japanese prosecutors’ office.
If it had only happened within Japan, they might have been able to smother it somehow, but because it had become an international incident, that was no longer possible.
Samara’s revelations threw the Japanese prosecutors’ heavy-handed, inhumane investigative methods onto the chopping block, and the world learned that there were glaring holes in the management of suspects on bail and in border control.
Even the Japanese public was furious.
The enraged Japanese prosecutors raided the security firm that had helped plan the escape and indicted every single person involved without exception.
They also asked Turkey and the United States to arrest everyone connected to the operation.
Turkey complied and arrested the private jet pilot and the airline staff who had transported Samara’s party from Atatürk Airport.
But they were only accomplices.
The people believed to have planned the escape itself were the Cullen brothers, Ben Cullen and Oliver Cullen.
They were experts who had extracted people from conflict zones more than once before, and it turned out they had even run through rehearsals before carrying out the operation.
After safely escorting Chairman Samara to Jordan, they returned to the United States.
Japan requested Ben Cullen and Oliver Cullen’s extradition from the United States, and the Americans arrested the two men for the time being.
They turned themselves in and confessed that they had carried out the escape at Chairman Samara’s request.
But no matter how many accomplices were arrested, there was no way to forcibly bring back Chairman Samara once he had already returned to his home country.
Samara held press conferences every day and gave interviews to news organizations around the world.
“Japan has a judicial system so backward it’s hard to believe it belongs to a developed nation. Foreigners there aren’t even guaranteed the most basic human rights. For all this time, I was cruelly separated from my family and friends and left isolated by the Japanese prosecutors. I had no choice but to escape Japan in order to protect myself and my family.”
The Japanese prosecutors denounced him fiercely as nothing more than a criminal who had committed a crime and fled, but unfortunately for them, international opinion was on Samara’s side.
Kenji Suzuki, the chief prosecutor at the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, was bombarded with calls from powerful people for days.
This was exactly the kind of situation I’d been worried about, which was why I’d kept him under house arrest and blocked him from giving interviews to the press.
And yet he’d actually managed to escape Japan!
No matter how powerful the Japanese prosecutors were, they couldn’t silence Samara once he was ranting in Jordan.
Once the incident had broken, someone had to take the blame.
The bureaucratic ritual of passing the buck began, and naturally the responsibility settled on the prosecutor who had been in charge of the case.
Suzuki summoned the man and barked at him, “What the hell is this humiliating mess!? How are you going to take responsibility for this?”
Kentaro Yoshine stood there with his mouth shut, taking the reprimand.
To be honest, he felt wronged.
After all, he hadn’t been the one who let Samara out on bail, and he wasn’t the one watching over his house.
After yelling himself hoarse, Suzuki finally ran out of steam and snapped at him, “If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
Yoshine slowly opened his mouth.
“The private equity firm Continue Capital is behind this.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Han Miru, one of the co-CEOs, came to Japan in person and met with Chairman Samara. Then, once the escape was complete, he left Japan. He came here to carry out the escape plan.”
“Do you have evidence?”
“I met Han Miru before the incident. He told me then that Kionos would face a major crisis in the near future. He must have been planning the escape from that point on.”
Suzuki looked incredulous. “Why bring that up now?”
“I—I didn’t know at the time.”
“And that’s supposed to be evidence?”
“Short interest in Kionos more than doubled right before Chairman Samara escaped. If you investigate the short sellers, you’ll find ties to Continue Capital.”
“So you’re saying they orchestrated the escape to drive down the stock price?”
“Yes.”
Suzuki slammed his fist on the desk and shouted, “How do you expect me to investigate that!? And so what if Continue Capital shorted the stock? Does that prove they carried out the escape? You need direct evidence, don’t you? The whole prosecutor’s office is already a laughingstock, and now you want us to go after an American private equity firm without a shred of proof?”
He was right.
Even if they investigated, there was no way they would find evidence that Continue Capital had planned the escape. That was precisely why they’d been able to move in and out of Japan so confidently.
Forcing himself to calm down, Suzuki said, “If you simply take the blame and resign, this can all be over.”
Only a few days earlier, Yoshine had been a star prosecutor known across the country.
Politicians had already begun courting him, and business leaders had quietly started trying to get in line.
And now he had been branded as a man who couldn’t properly control a single criminal and had ended up damaging the organization he belonged to—and, by extension, the country itself.
The Japanese prosecutors did not forgive mistakes. If this continued, he would be shoved aside, sent from one dead-end post to another, and eventually forced out.
He had once had a brilliant future laid out in front of him.
Maybe he could have risen through politics, too, and climbed to some impossibly high office.
But all of it had vanished like smoke.
Yoshine gritted his teeth at the thought of Han Miru.
That bastard.
Chairman Samara’s disclosures had been deadly, one after another.
Once he released material showing that Chairman Saito had been involved in illegal measures to crush the labor union, the union declared a strike.
When it was revealed that the company had hidden a chemical leak at a semiconductor plant, nearby residents took to the streets to demand the factory’s shutdown, and the government, pushed by public outrage, announced that it would conduct a full inspection of every semiconductor plant in the country.
Politicians and bureaucrats whose names appeared on Kionos’s lobbying list were exposed one after another, and even the Japanese government’s planned one-trillion-yen investment program ran into trouble.
As proof of collusion between politics and business came to light, public anger in Japan boiled over, and foreign companies joined the criticism as well, warning that fair competition was being threatened.
Then came allegations of accounting fraud.
The claim was that they had concealed the fact that the yield on their new process for producing NAND flash memory had fallen below expectations.
The losses were only about 15 billion yen.
Compared to Kionos’s assets and profits, it was trivial. At that level, they could have simply written it off as a bad asset in the next fiscal year and moved on.
And yield would have improved over time anyway, so it wasn’t a major issue.
But…
Chairman Samara raised his voice.
“Apply the same standard to Japanese executives that you applied to me! Or is the Japanese prosecutor’s office the kind of place that goes easy on Japanese people and treats foreigners like dirt?”
The Japanese prosecutors had spent their time collecting every little irregularity they could find in Kionos and adding it to Samara’s charges.
But if they discovered even more serious misconduct and did nothing about it, it would amount to an admission that they had carried out a targeted investigation.
With no choice, the prosecutors began investigating the directors whose names were on the list.
Half the board was now under scrutiny.
In any case, all they had to do was pretend to investigate properly and then hand down suspended sentences once public anger died down.
The problem was that one of the alliance clauses Kionos had signed with SPME stated that if the charges were serious enough, a director could be removed even before trial.
That was the clause Kionos’s board had used to ambush Samara and dismiss him in the first place.
SPME, using the same clause, demanded the removal of the directors now under investigation and announced that it would appoint new ones itself.
“Because of Kionos, SPME is taking damage too.”
“How could they ruin a thriving company like this in less than a year?”
“You can’t let Japanese people run management.”
“We can’t keep watching Kionos’s reckless leadership any longer.”
“SPME should exercise its rights as a shareholder.”
SPME notified them that it would at least fill the board with representatives proportionate to its stake, and Kionos pushed back hard, saying it would never allow it.
It made sense, because accepting that demand could derail the management separation they had been accelerating and even reopen the door to a renewed merger push.
But SPME refused to back down.
Their attempted merger with Kionos had already generated plenty of noise. It wasn’t exactly a shrimp swallowing a whale, but people had questioned whether it made any sense for SPME, whose market cap and sales were less than half of Kionos’s, to absorb the company.
Now, however, Kionos’s stock crash had brought the two companies’ market caps close together.
It was now proven that the public and private sectors had colluded to drive Chairman Samara out, the executives were under investigation for accounting fraud, government investment had been halted, and even the existing factories might have to be stopped.
From one angle, it was the perfect chance to push the merger through.
President Deschamps said publicly, “Japanese companies must respect the rights of their shareholders.”
In other words, he was saying not to interfere with SPME exercising shareholder rights against Kionos.
Then Prime Minister Hinata stepped in as well.
“Kionos is a core national industry for Japan. Because it is directly tied to Japan’s economic security, we will never tolerate a predatory merger at the government level.”
President Deschamps summoned the Japanese ambassador and made his strong displeasure known over the unlawful investigation of his citizens, and Prime Minister Hinata in turn summoned the French ambassador.
As both governments headed toward an unshakable standoff over the merger, every business plan Kionos had drawn up went off the rails.
Kionos was Yuseong Electronics’ strongest rival in memory semiconductors.
More recently, its stock had broken above 10,000 yen on the back of hopes that it would benefit from Japanese government investment and Yuseong Electronics’ customer losses.
Then, as bad news piled on top of bad news, that stock price collapsed in an instant.
The share price, which had once climbed as high as 10,800 yen, had now fallen to 4,200 yen.
As the company wavered and its stock price crashed, bitter complaints poured out from shareholders and investors.
I received a call from Chairman Samara.
“To be honest, when I first heard your escape plan, I wasn’t sure whether to believe it. But I never expected it to succeed so easily.”
“Was it difficult for you?”
“Haha! At my age, curling up inside a case wasn’t exactly easy. Riding in the cargo hold of a private jet wasn’t much fun either. But honestly, it was more entertaining than I expected. It was the most thrilling thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Well, it was the kind of thing most people would never experience in their entire lives.
“And thanks to you, I’ve got myself a nice severance package, too.”
“I’m glad you liked it.”
Maybe because I’d invested fifty million dollars, he had exposed everything with real determination. A fan turning into an enemy really was a terrifying thing.
If he had exposed it a year later, it wouldn’t have done much damage, but exposing it now had been enough to blow the stock to pieces.
When you looked at it that way, timing really was everything when it came to a leak.
“How is Jordan?”
“It feels good to be back home after so long.”
Just from his voice, he sounded genuinely at ease.
Judging by how well he must have eaten and slept over the past few days, he seemed to have put on a little weight, too, at least from the way he looked in the interviews.
“Come visit sometime.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
As I was about to hang up, Chairman Samara spoke again.
“Thank you.”
I smiled.
“No, thank you. I appreciate it too.”