Volkswagen CEOs charged by German court over diesel scandal
The company has issued a statement denying charges of market manipulation
The company has issued a statement denying charges of market manipulation
The company has issued a statement denying charges of market manipulation
The company has issued a statement denying charges of market manipulation
German prosecutors said they would press criminal charges of stock market manipulation against Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, non-executive chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch and former CEO Martin Winterkorn, in relation to the diesel-emissions tampering scandal that came to light in 2015.
Prosecutors allege that the company’s shareholders were not informed quickly enough about the financial fallout of the diesel scandal, alleging that this amounted to market manipulation.
Lawyers for the three say that they will contest the charges, with a Volkswagen statement to Bloomberg confirming that CEO Diess will not step down. A statement by Volkswagen said that the company had cooperated closely with the public prosecutor’s office, and that, based on an ‘extensive and independent investigations since autumn 2015’, could not see that the market was not informed. In addition, they state that they could not have anticipated the publication of allegations by US authorities that had led to the share price crashing.
Winternkorn and three other managers were also charged with fraud and a breach of competition laws by the prosecutors in April. Then, the prosecution had accused Winternkorn of approving software updates designed to mask the diesel emissions manipulation.
Winterkorn had resigned from his post in September 2015 over the scandal, which came about after the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the auto-maker was intentionally programmed its Turbocharged Diesel Injection (TDI) engines with ‘defeat devices’ to reduce their emissions during laboratory emissions testing, allowing them to artificially meet NOx emissions standards even though they would emit 40 times more of that amount in real-world conditions.
Over 600,000 cars were fitted with the devices in the US alone, with millions around the world (models sold between 2009 and 2015).
Volkswagen pleaded guilty to charges in 2017, by which time the company had announced plan to refit the affected vehicles. That year, it came to light that vehicles from Fiat, Volvo, Renault, Jeep, Hyundai and Citroen were all also showing deviations in NOx readings between their testing figures and real-world figures.