Yahoo Autos US Charges Martin Winterkorn With Four Felonies
For a long time, it appeared that former Volkswagen Group CEO Martin Winterkorn would skirt any legal consequences for the company’s diesel-emissions scandal, but Winterkorn has now been charged with four felonies in the United States that could lead to years in federal prison.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday unsealed an indictment filed in a Detroit district court on March 14 naming Winterkorn, 70, and five other VW executives who were formally charged in January 2017 but remain in Germany. The DOJ is charging him with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and VW customers, violating the Clean Air Act, and three counts of wire fraud. Until now, Winterkorn, who immediately resigned in September 2015 after admitting to the Environmental Protection Agency that VW had manipulated emissions tests on a half-million diesel cars imported to the U.S., had not been formally charged.
Specifically, Winterkorn allegedly knew of the 2014 study that outed VW’s rigged emissions system-conducted in part by West Virginia University-by May of that year. The DOJ alleges Winterkorn received a one-page memo from Bernd Gottweis, a former quality supervisor under indictment, warning him of a potential U.S. investigation for VW’s excessive nitrogen-oxide emissions. In July 2015, Winterkorn chaired a “damage table meeting” with other VW executives outlaying “precisely what information had been disclosed and what had not yet been disclosed” along with the “potential consequences of VW being caught cheating,” according to the indictment.
Oliver Schmidt, who was general manager of VW’s Michigan environmental and engineering office, then met with officials at the California Air Resources Board in August under Winterkorn’s direction. That same month, another unnamed VW employee met with CARB and “continued to conceal VW’s cheating” before the automaker spilled the beans publicly in September. The DOJ alleges that Winterkorn was “clearly informed of the emissions cheating” and had “agreed with other senior VW executives to continue to perpetrate the fraud and deceive U.S. regulators.”
Winterkorn and VW had not released a statement as of press time.
did not admit any fault
“I am doing this in the interests of the company even though I am not aware of any wrongdoing on my part,” he said.
VW’s executive committee had also released a statement claiming he “had no knowledge of the manipulation of emissions data.”
Schmidt, 48, is currently serving seven years in prison and must pay a $400,000 fine. Engineer James Robert Liang, 63, was sentenced to 40 months and ordered to pay a $200,000 fine in August. A former Audi engine-development executive, Italian Zaccheo Giovanni Pamio, 61, was charged in July and may be extradited from Germany.
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