Renault and Nissan have hammered out a historic deal to salvage their troubled 24-year-old alliance and convince both sides that the partnership can survive without its former supremo, Carlos Ghosn.

The hard-fought agreement creates a pathway for the carmakers to restore a working level of trust and resume cooperation in select technical areas after the disruption and internal rows that followed the arrest of Ghosn more than four years ago.

Under the deal, which has yet to be formally approved by the Nissan board, the carmakers have agreed to equalize their stake-holdings in each other, removing a source of tension that has dogged the relationship since its inception.

The greater cooperation will be critical, said people close to both companies, as the pair seek to progress in the intensely competitive electric vehicle market.

The breakthrough comes after months of stalemate with executives at Renault hoping the reset will create just enough goodwill to move ahead on joint projects, after Nissan’s frustration with the alliance’s lopsided structure.

It is also hoped it will close the bitter chapter that followed the departure of Ghosn after his arrest in 2018 on financial misconduct charges, which he has denied.

France’s Renault will cut its 43 percent stake in Japan’s Nissan to 15 percent by transferring a 28.4 percent stake to a French trust, where the voting rights will be “neutralized” for most decisions, the groups said on Monday.

Renault will sell the shares in the trust when it makes sense financially, although it is under “no obligation” to divest in a certain timeframe, they added. Meanwhile, Nissan will hold on to its 15 percent stake in Renault as part of the agreement and gain the voting rights it had long requested.

Alongside the shareholding shake-up, the deal also includes an agreement for Nissan to take a minority stake in Ampere, Renault’s electric vehicle spin-off, and invest in several new joint production plans.

The joint projects in Latin America, India, and Europe come with the aim of “reloading the partnership,” the two companies said.

Negotiations had been taking place for months, and the final details were not settled even hours before the statement came out, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The strongest opposition came from the Japanese carmaker’s non-executive directors. They expressed concerns about whether the deal “would sufficiently protect Nissan’s interests,” one of the people said.

Although the shareholding imbalance created underlying tension within the alliance, its former head Ghosn was largely successful in papering over the differences.

With his departure and no strong figure to bind the group together, the alliance came close to collapse for the first time in two decades.

People close to Nissan said the new framework provided a way for the two companies to hold more constructive discussions on technology sharing and strategy.

“There can’t be a worse situation than the current one. There was just distrust and hardly any cooperation any more,” said one person familiar with the alliance.

Daniel Röska, an automotive industry analyst at Bernstein, said the deal finally resolved the “Gordian knot” linking the two businesses.

He said the new joint projects were likely to be “deal sweeteners in order to get Nissan over the line on the Ampere IPO.”

Keeping the partnership allows the groups to at least hold on to some concrete savings, such as from joint purchasing programs, at a time when carmakers globally need to make massive investments in electric vehicles and other innovations.

Renault also needed Nissan’s green light for some elements of its own reorganization, as the French carmaker was trying to lift revenues and margins under chief executive Luca de Meo. This included the planned Ampere spin-off, which should come to the London stock market this year, people familiar with those plans said.

Nissan and Renault had locked horns over intellectual property rights linked to some of the technology involved, although this stand-off has been largely resolved.

Renault is also due to carve out a new division dedicated to combustion engines, including gasoline and hybrid motors. Chinese automaker Geely will bring assets to the unit, which will sell engines to third parties.

Renault and Geely are in talks with Saudi Aramco, which could come in as an investor with a stake of 10 to 20 percent, four people close to those talks said, while the two carmakers would be equal partners in the rest of the venture.

The terms of that deal have not been finalized, but Aramco’s investment would value the unit at between 5 billion euro and 10 billion euro, three of the people said. The Saudi oil group has been developing research on synthetic fuels.

Aramco did not respond to requests for comment.

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