Carlos Ghosn has paid more than 760,000 euros to the company of a man who organized his escape

Carlos Ghosn, the former president of Nissan Motor Co, paid $ 862,500 (about € 764,000) last year to a company led by one of the two men who then helped him escape from the Japan, US prosecutors quoted by Reuters said on Tuesday.

The file filed Tuesday in the federal court of Massachusetts reports electronic transfers from a bank account in Paris in favor of Fox Fox LLC, a company managed by Peter Taylor and one of his brothers Oliver. The father, Michael Taylor, a United States Army special forces veteran and private security specialist, is the other man involved in the leak.

The record does not say how much the Taylor's were paid, but prosecutors said it reflected "additional evidence" that they had the resources to flee and that they should remain detained as "risks of absconding".

A contested extradition request

The disclosure came less than a day after the men, Michael Taylor and his son Peter Taylor, who are trying to avoid extradition to Japan in connection with the escape of Carlos Ghosn, asked an American judge to release them on bail.

Their lawyers said they had been detained for more than six weeks at the Norfolk County Correctional Center in Massachusetts, where 36 detainees and staff tested positive for COVID-19.

According to their defenders, arrest warrants and extradition requests are not valid. "There is also no risk of absconding and there are undoubtedly conditions under which they can be released," wrote their defenders. A Taylor lawyer declined to comment on the bank transfers.

Request rejected

In a decision released Tuesday, US investigative judge Donald Cabell denied the Taylor's request to cancel their arrest warrants, with a written order to follow. He did not rule on their bail requests.

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Ghosn case: new images of alleged accomplices at Istanbul airport

Carlos Ghosn fled last December to Beirut from Japan, where he had been under house arrest for financial crimes he denied, by being smuggled into a box to a private jet. Lebanon does not have an extradition treaty with Japan.