From time to time I moan about greed and about how there is far too much of it in our world. Made worse, to my mind, by the rich both getting a lot richer and by more or less boasting about it. The poor are getting envious & cross - and may some day break out their pitch forks. Or vote for Brexit.
So I was interested to read over breakfast about the rise and fall of a titan of the car industry, one Carlos Ghosn. A Brazilian of Lebanese descent, who went to a fancy school in France and who went on to a stellar career in the car industry, ending up as the boss of the confederation of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishu, between them making more than 1 in 10 of the world's cars. So the chap is clearly very gifted, which probably includes both being very clever in the way of examinations in Geography & Mathematics and being very good at all that interpersonal, cuddling stuff.
But he is also very greedy and it is his greed which was the trigger for his downfall, with his only caring to declare around half of his £10 million a year Japanese salary to the Japanese tax authorities. It is not clear, but he may well be drawing a salary in France too. He is also accused of various other peccadillos, probably stuff like using the company jet to take off for a weekend with his mistress in the Caribbean, possibly on an island tax haven, possibly rented to him by that other titan of tax evasion, Richard Branson.
Depressing that such talents and such greed should co-exist in the same person. I would have hoped that the former would have squeezed out the latter.
PS: there is also a suggestion that he was left in post for too long. There really ought to be a rule that no-one can be in an important job for more than ten years. No exceptions.
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