> Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior ("we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity") representative of behavioral patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies?
It happens a lot more than you might expect. Usually it's "just" a bit of sexual harrasment. But the combination of power, arrogance, and unacountability can cause all sorts of things to happen. Like the Suisse spying scandal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51411640
Or Carlos Ghosn being smuggled out of Japan in an instrument case. Or Shkreli. Or Theranos, Enron, etc. Most boardrooms are boring, but there is a big fiasco every year or so.
In Carlos Ghosn's case, there's an argument to be made. Japan doesn't have a well functioning judicial system (any judicial system with 99.9% conviction rate is by definition completely broken), that forced confessions are common (in Japan you can be detained up to 21 days with little to no cause, interrogations are not done in the presence of a lawyer and there's no law against "facilitating" confessions by prevent you to sleep during those days).
I wouldn't trust the Japanese legal system to be fair and uphold justice, even less so in a politicized case like this one.
By the time Carlos Ghosn was smuggled out of Japan, he had been gone from Renault/Nissan for almost a year. So it's not like this was organized by a team at Nissan working under Ghosn.
The Ghosn issue is much more complicated though. There are arguments that the judicial system was politicised in a manner. He was a foreigner who fell out of favour in a land that protects their own. See Olympus Camera scandal.
a grain of salt and all of that, there is at least some evidence that Ghosen was set up, or at least allowed to behave badly for the purpose of ousting him later...
It happens a lot more than you might expect. Usually it's "just" a bit of sexual harrasment. But the combination of power, arrogance, and unacountability can cause all sorts of things to happen. Like the Suisse spying scandal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51411640
Or Carlos Ghosn being smuggled out of Japan in an instrument case. Or Shkreli. Or Theranos, Enron, etc. Most boardrooms are boring, but there is a big fiasco every year or so.