Weeks after its latest attempted new start with an all-electric car, Volkswagen is again in the legal weeds over its years-old "dieselgate" scandal, as charges against top executives pile on top of mass lawsuits by investors and car owners. In a new blow to the auto giant, German prosecutors said Tuesday they had charged Volkswagen's chief executive Herbert Diess, former boss Martin Winterkorn and supervisory board chief Hans Dieter Poetsch with "market manipulation".
The prosecutors argued that the VW chiefs should have informed shareholders about the investigation into so-called defeat devices as soon as they learnt of it, not wait until US authorities dropped the bombshell news on September 18, 2015, sharply driving down stock prices. Underlining the cloud that has hung over Germany's once-vaunted car industry since the VW scandal broke in 2015, another major auto giant, Daimler, said it would pay an 870 million euro ($957 million) fine over hundreds of thousands of diesel vehicles that breached emissions rules.
The Daimler fine related to some 684,000 vehicles which have been flagged for excessive emissions by the KBA transport authority. The company has however always contested involvement in the dieselgate scandal. Car behemoth Volkswagen admitted four years ago that it built software into 11 million cars worldwide that made them appear less polluting in the lab than they were in real on-road driving.
In a 636-page indictment, prosecutors in the north German city of Brunswick said Diess, Winterkorn and Poetsch "are accused of deliberately informing capital markets too late about the significant payment obligations in the billions arising from the so-called 'diesel scandal', thereby illegally influencing the share price".
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