YOKOHAMA: Shareholders of Nissan Motor Co. approved Tuesday a slate of four new board members, including President and Chief Executive Officer Makoto Uchida.

The three others are Chief Operating Officer Ashwani Gupta, Executive Vice President Hideyuki Sakamoto and Pierre Fleuriot, lead independent director at Renault SA, the Japanese automaker's alliance partner in France.

Uchida's predecessor, Hiroto Saikawa, quit the board.

The main challenge of Nissan's new leadership is to recover from the fallout of the arrest in Japan in November 2018 of former Chairman Carlos Ghosn for alleged financial misconduct including concealment of his pay.

"The management and employees are currently working together to regain customer trust," Uchida told shareholders at an extraordinary meeting in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo.

"We will make efforts so that shareholders can feel that the company has started changing," he added, seeking their support for its turnaround efforts.

Nissan, mired by sluggish vehicle sales globally, swung into a group net loss of 26 billion yen in the October-December quarter, planning to skip year-end dividends.

Many shareholders voiced their frustrations over Nissan's poor earnings performance and its slumping stock price.

"I'm taking the situation very seriously," Uchida said, offering an apology.

Saikawa, who resigned as Nissan president and CEO in September over his own pay scandal, has no chance of influencing the company, which has already decided to scrap advisory posts, a position that had been customarily taken by former CEOs.

In April last year, Nissan held an extraordinary shareholder meeting to seek approval for the dismissal of Ghosn as a board member. It is rare that a company has held such a meeting twice in less than a year.

JIJI Press