In a landmark move, the U.S. Department of Justice has indicted six Volkswagen executives as part of the automaker’s high-profile diesel emissions scandal.
One executive was arrested this week, and the others are reportedly still in Germany. More indictments could be handed down in the coming weeks. Moves like this are rare in the auto world, where companies are regularly punished, but executives tend to be protected.
The pursuit of executives by criminal prosecutors is a rare occurrence among big companies, whose top people almost never face jail time. In other recent scandals involving automakers such as GM and Toyota — in which safety defects led to deaths of drivers and passengers — the companies paid big fines but admitted no criminal wrongdoing; and no executive saw the inside of a prison cell.
The indictments add to the $4.3 billion in fines Volkswagen will have to pay. On Wednesday, the company pled guilty to charges that included conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act.
The penalty, which includes a criminal fine of $2.8bn, is the second-largest criminal environmental settlement in US history, behind BP’s Deepwater Horizon case. It represents an attempt by one of the world’s largest carmakers to resolve a scandal that ranks as the worst crisis in the company’s history. VW pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act and commit wire fraud, obstruction of justice and making false statements in order to import goods.
“As you all know we cannot put companies in jail, but we can hold their employees personally accountable and we can force companies to pay hefty fines,” FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told reporters.
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Among the indicted executives are Heinz-Jakob Neusser, age 56; Jens Hadler, age 50; Richard Dorenkamp, age 68; Bernd Gottweis, age 69; Oliver Schmidt, age 48; and Jürgen Peter, age 59. So far, only Schmidt has been arrested and charged. He was detained at a Miami airport as he was intending to fly back to Germany.
VW’s supervisory board chair, Hans Dieter Pötsch, told The Washington Post:
When the diesel matter became public, we promised that we would get to the bottom of it and find out how it happened – comprehensively and objectively. . . . We are no longer the same company we were 16 months ago.
There’s no word yet on whether or how the other five executives are expected to be formally charged.
from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2jIULag
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