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TOKYO (Reuters) – Mitsubishi Motors Corp said Friday that Osamu Masuko had resigned as chairman for fitness reasons and assigned the task to CEO Takao Kato.
Masuko, a veteran of The Mitsubishi Conglomerate, joined the automaker in 2004 and was president in 2007. He oversaw the creation of the partnership between Mitsubishi and Nissan Motor Co in 2016, in which Nissan acquired a majority stake in the company.
The 71-year-old would remain at Mitsubishi as a special adviser, the company said in a statement. He didn’t specify what Masuko was suffering from.
Masuko was in command of Mitsubishi in a 2016 scandal in which the automaker overesvalued the mileage of its vehicles. Research found that the lack of governance and pressure on resource-poor engineers were chronic disruptions in the company.
The Mitsubishi scandal is third in two decades, and has bitten profits and tarnished the automaker’s brand. At the height of the scandal, Nissan provided a lifeline to its smallest rival by providing the company with $2.2 billion for a 34% controlling stake.
The agreement reached between Masuko and Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn brought Mitsubishi as a junior spouse in the Nissan-Renault car manufacturing alliance.
Masuko then denounced his ties to Ghosn after Ghosn’s 2018 arrest in Japan for monetary misconduct. Ghosn denied the charges.
The alliance’s 3 members are lately mired in monetary unrest after years of competitive expansion policies of Ghosn’s leadership that led to a drop in vehicle sales.
An additional decline in global demand for cars due to the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated those problems, and Mitsubishi, Nissan and Renault are preparing for heavy annual operating losses this year.
(Report through Naomi Tajitsu; edited through Shri Navaratnam and Muralikumar Anantharaman)