Reuters (Paris) - Renault CEO said the company did not break any laws when it conducted a lengthy internal inquiry into suspected industrial spying which led the French automaker to fire three executives.
In an interview in Sunday's Journal du Dimanche newspaper, Ghosn said he was "surprised and shocked" when the automaker's head of security and its legal director came to him in late August with information about the senior executives.
"Renault has very precise procedures," Ghosn told the newspaper. "I decided that the usual processes should be used. I told the teams 'Conduct your inquiries, keep management involved, and keep me regularly informed of the progress of your investigation'."
"The ethics committee, the group's security service and the management got to work ... I personally followed the progress of this process step by step."
Ghosn declined to comment on whether Renault had enlisted a private agency to carry out its own investigations into the three executives, who have strongly denied any wrongdoing and say they plan to sue the company.
"All the information in our possession is today in the hands of judicial authorities," he said. "I am not going to go into details here of what we did. But we have been irreproachable from a legal point of view."
The three executives are Michel Balthazard, former vice president of advanced engineering at Renault, and his deputy Bertrand Rochette, as well as the former deputy director of the electric vehicles program, Matthieu Tenenbaum.
Ghosn said the leaked information was not about technology but rather the economic model which Renault planned to use in the electric sector.
He said he had "no conviction" about who was the recipient of the information. Renault filed a legal complaint alleging that the information had been passed onto a foreign power without saying which one.
The scandal has threatened to harm improving relations between France and China after a government source said intelligence services were looking into a possible connection with China as part of initial checks before the official probe.
"The counter-espionage services opened an investigation last week. I repeat, they have all the material. Today, we are waiting for the justice system to do its work," Ghosn said, adding that this could take several months.
Ghosn said Renault had been greeted with skepticism when it unveiled its electric car strategy in 2006 but was now the only automaker producing its own electric motor, battery and charging system.
"When an automaker is at the forefront of technology, let's not be naive, that interests a lot of people," he said.
