mikeavelli
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German Big 3 automakers emissions cheating disaster Master Thread
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CIF
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Yeah those are massive cuts, and I'm not sure that's the end of it. Who knows when this scandal will end for VW. Consequences could possibly stretch into over a decade.
mikeavelli
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So apparently since VW said return the cars in running condition, which is super vague, owners are taking their cars apart and returning them bare lol...
Hilarity continues.
http://www.leftlanenews.com/vw-tdi-owners-stripping-parts-before-returning-cars-93577.html
Hilarity continues.
http://www.leftlanenews.com/vw-tdi-owners-stripping-parts-before-returning-cars-93577.html
^ I saw that a couple days back, laughable. But sadly these cars are pieces of crap and owners will never be fully compensated. Stripping some parts will make some feel a little better. VW's fraud / criminal activity aftermath drags on and on.
mmcartalk
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On topic, approximately another $1 billion is being added to VW's US civil settlement for cheating on the bigger VW/ Porsche/Audi diesel engines (something VW originally lied about/denied). Final details of this additional settlement still being worked out. Even before this added $1 billion was announced, VW's $15 billion civil settlement was already the largest in US automotive history.
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mmcartalk
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Six VW officials have been indicted....though it is unclear, if they are not American citizens, whether or not those American-sourced indictments can stick.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...3ab895&wpisrc=al_alert-COMBO-economy%2Bnation
U.S. officials indicted six executives at German automaker Volkswagen on Wednesday in connection with the company’s efforts to deliberately deceive U.S. regulators about the emissions standards of its diesel engine vehicles and sell those cars illegally to American drivers.
Five of the six executives, at least some of which were described as high ranking, are currently in Germany. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said it was too soon to say how that will impact legal proceedings moving forward. The sixth executive, Olivier Schmidt, was arrested and charged in Miami earlier this week.
Additional executives at the company are being investigated and could potentially face charges, Lynch said.
Volkswagen has agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to three criminal counts, arare admission of wrongdoing for a major company, and pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil fines in a settlement with the Department of Justice.
“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,” said FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
“This is really a reflection of the fact that faceless multinational corporations don’t commit crimes, flesh-and-blood people commit crimes,” added Sally Q. Yates, deputy attorney general. “And we’ve sharpened our focus to ensure that we’re doing everything form the very beginning of an investigation… to hold those individuals accountable and build out from there.”
Volkswagen will pay a $2.8 billion penalty to resolve the criminal charges. The company will pay an additional $1.5 billion to settle civil claims that it violated environmental, customs and finance laws as part of its deception.
The guilty plea and fines match the settlement terms Volkswagen outlined yesterday, when the company confirmed that “advanced discussions” with U.S. officials to resolve the charges were underway. The proposed deal still needed the approval of the company’s board.
The settlement must now be approved in court. That date has yet to be scheduled, a Justice Department spokesman said.
Volkswagen is charged with conspiring to defraud the government and violate environmental regulations from May 2006 to November 2015 by installing devices in its diesel engine vehicles that obscure the amount of nitrogen oxide they spew into the air. Those devices and accompanying software allowed Volkswagen to evade regulators for years, the Justice Department asserts.
However, Volkswagen falsely claimed that its vehicles met all environmental regulations in order to import and sell the affected vehicles in the United States from 2009 to 2015, according to the charges. In all, the emissions scandal touched 11 million vehicles worldwide, including more than half a million sold in the United States.
When U.S. officials finally caught onto the ruse, Volkswagen “did corruptly alter, destroy, mutilate and conceal business records” in order to obstruct the investigation, charging documents declare. In August and September 2015, a Volkswagen supervisor is accused of deleting emails and files related to the deceptive device and instructing employees to do the same, charging documents show.
Those criminal charges, which Volkswagen must still formally admit to in court, were also the basis for three civil allegations brought against the company.
Wednesday’s announcement will bring Volkswagen’s total fines to roughly $20 billion. The largest of those penalties was the $14.7 billion the company was ordered to pay to buyback cars and otherwise compensate customers impacted by the scandal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...3ab895&wpisrc=al_alert-COMBO-economy%2Bnation
U.S. officials indicted six executives at German automaker Volkswagen on Wednesday in connection with the company’s efforts to deliberately deceive U.S. regulators about the emissions standards of its diesel engine vehicles and sell those cars illegally to American drivers.
Five of the six executives, at least some of which were described as high ranking, are currently in Germany. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said it was too soon to say how that will impact legal proceedings moving forward. The sixth executive, Olivier Schmidt, was arrested and charged in Miami earlier this week.
Additional executives at the company are being investigated and could potentially face charges, Lynch said.
Volkswagen has agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to three criminal counts, arare admission of wrongdoing for a major company, and pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil fines in a settlement with the Department of Justice.
“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,” said FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
“This is really a reflection of the fact that faceless multinational corporations don’t commit crimes, flesh-and-blood people commit crimes,” added Sally Q. Yates, deputy attorney general. “And we’ve sharpened our focus to ensure that we’re doing everything form the very beginning of an investigation… to hold those individuals accountable and build out from there.”
Volkswagen will pay a $2.8 billion penalty to resolve the criminal charges. The company will pay an additional $1.5 billion to settle civil claims that it violated environmental, customs and finance laws as part of its deception.
The guilty plea and fines match the settlement terms Volkswagen outlined yesterday, when the company confirmed that “advanced discussions” with U.S. officials to resolve the charges were underway. The proposed deal still needed the approval of the company’s board.
The settlement must now be approved in court. That date has yet to be scheduled, a Justice Department spokesman said.
Volkswagen is charged with conspiring to defraud the government and violate environmental regulations from May 2006 to November 2015 by installing devices in its diesel engine vehicles that obscure the amount of nitrogen oxide they spew into the air. Those devices and accompanying software allowed Volkswagen to evade regulators for years, the Justice Department asserts.
However, Volkswagen falsely claimed that its vehicles met all environmental regulations in order to import and sell the affected vehicles in the United States from 2009 to 2015, according to the charges. In all, the emissions scandal touched 11 million vehicles worldwide, including more than half a million sold in the United States.
When U.S. officials finally caught onto the ruse, Volkswagen “did corruptly alter, destroy, mutilate and conceal business records” in order to obstruct the investigation, charging documents declare. In August and September 2015, a Volkswagen supervisor is accused of deleting emails and files related to the deceptive device and instructing employees to do the same, charging documents show.
Those criminal charges, which Volkswagen must still formally admit to in court, were also the basis for three civil allegations brought against the company.
Wednesday’s announcement will bring Volkswagen’s total fines to roughly $20 billion. The largest of those penalties was the $14.7 billion the company was ordered to pay to buyback cars and otherwise compensate customers impacted by the scandal.
mikeavelli
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Even my wife is sending me links to their news. Where is the VW Congressional hearing, or is that just for Toyota?
mmcartalk
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They had one over a year ago...CEO Horn had to testify.
https://energycommerce.house.gov/ne...rsight-schedules-volkswagen-hearing-october-8
mmcartalk
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Takada is also in deep **** over the airbag-defect issue...though probably not to the same extent as VW. Nevertheless, three of their executives have been criminally charged. Here is the story, and the official release from DOJ:
(In fact, I felt this was significant enough that I also started a new thread on it)
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/taka...ay-1-billion-criminal-penalties-airbag-scheme
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Gecko
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German prosecutors raid headquarters of Volkswagen and Audi
German prosecutors raided the headquarters of Volkswagen and Audi on Wednesday as part of an investigation into the group's use of software to cheat diesel emissions tests in the U.S.
A company spokesman confirmed that Volkswagen's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany had been searched. He said that Audi offices in Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm were also raided, but no information was available on five other sites visited by police.
Volkswagen (VLKAY) has tried to turn the page on its emissions scandal in recent months, agreeing to pay billions of dollars in federal fines and pleading guilty to criminal charges in the U.S. But legal problems have continued to dog the firm, which sold more cars than any of its rivals last year.
In a complaint unsealed in January, U.S. prosecutors alleged that Volkswagen's executive managers in Germany were briefed in person about the emissions "defeat device" on or about July 27, 2015, but chose to keep regulators in the dark.
One executive present at the meeting, Oliver Schmidt, has been arrested by the FBI for his alleged role in the company's rampant cheating on emissions tests. Five other Volkswagen executives, who are all German, have been indicted.
U.S. prosecutors allege that the emissions scheme went on for nearly a decade. In 2006, Volkswagen engineers in Germany knew the company's new 2.0 liter diesel engine was not capable of meeting emissions regulations.
Instead of going back to the drawing board, they designed a "defeat device" software function that allowed cars to detect when their emissions were being tested, and to boost performance during that time.
The scheme began to unravel when a group of scientists at West Virginia University discovered in 2014 that Volkswagen cars were emitting far more pollutants than the automaker claimed.
The CEO of Volkswagen Group, Martin Winterkorn, resigned in September 2015 after the scandal was made public. Volkswagen Group of America CEO Michael Horn has also left the company.
Winterkorn stands accused of knowing about the emissions cheating way before the company came clean. He is being investigated in Germany for fraud.
Questions have been raised in recent months over what German Chancellor Angela Merkel knew about the scandal, and when. Merkel is running for a fourth term as chancellor.
Merkel testified last week that she learned about Volkswagen's use of emissions cheating software through the media.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/15/investing/volkswagen-audi-emissions-scandal-raids/index.html
German prosecutors raided the headquarters of Volkswagen and Audi on Wednesday as part of an investigation into the group's use of software to cheat diesel emissions tests in the U.S.
A company spokesman confirmed that Volkswagen's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany had been searched. He said that Audi offices in Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm were also raided, but no information was available on five other sites visited by police.
Volkswagen (VLKAY) has tried to turn the page on its emissions scandal in recent months, agreeing to pay billions of dollars in federal fines and pleading guilty to criminal charges in the U.S. But legal problems have continued to dog the firm, which sold more cars than any of its rivals last year.
In a complaint unsealed in January, U.S. prosecutors alleged that Volkswagen's executive managers in Germany were briefed in person about the emissions "defeat device" on or about July 27, 2015, but chose to keep regulators in the dark.
One executive present at the meeting, Oliver Schmidt, has been arrested by the FBI for his alleged role in the company's rampant cheating on emissions tests. Five other Volkswagen executives, who are all German, have been indicted.
U.S. prosecutors allege that the emissions scheme went on for nearly a decade. In 2006, Volkswagen engineers in Germany knew the company's new 2.0 liter diesel engine was not capable of meeting emissions regulations.
Instead of going back to the drawing board, they designed a "defeat device" software function that allowed cars to detect when their emissions were being tested, and to boost performance during that time.
The scheme began to unravel when a group of scientists at West Virginia University discovered in 2014 that Volkswagen cars were emitting far more pollutants than the automaker claimed.
The CEO of Volkswagen Group, Martin Winterkorn, resigned in September 2015 after the scandal was made public. Volkswagen Group of America CEO Michael Horn has also left the company.
Winterkorn stands accused of knowing about the emissions cheating way before the company came clean. He is being investigated in Germany for fraud.
Questions have been raised in recent months over what German Chancellor Angela Merkel knew about the scandal, and when. Merkel is running for a fourth term as chancellor.
Merkel testified last week that she learned about Volkswagen's use of emissions cheating software through the media.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/15/investing/volkswagen-audi-emissions-scandal-raids/index.html
mmcartalk
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Interesting. Wonder what would have happened if security had not let them through the gates. VW has a huge security force to guard their facilities. And even if security had let them in (or had been forced to let them in, by the threat of further action), they could have flashed a quick, emergency message to top brass that the agents were coming.
Lol, I didn't know VW had a "huge security force", (like that's relevant, since the German government has far greater security forces with even deadlier weapons).
But yes the corrupt relationship of VW and its home country government is old news, even as this plays out. The continuation of coverup activities isn't helping VW.
But yes the corrupt relationship of VW and its home country government is old news, even as this plays out. The continuation of coverup activities isn't helping VW.
mmcartalk
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Obviously, I wasn't trying to compare VW's security force to the military. What I was saying is that, if it wanted to, it was probably large enough to have stalled things at the front gates long enough (demanding to see papers/documents, search warrants, authorization, etc.....) for a quick message to be sent upstairs to the brass, who might have just enough time to quickly hide any critical stuff.
This story, though, is probably going to be overshadowed by any VW/FCA merger-proposals if Marchionne and Muller are serious about discussing it. We, of course, already have a thread going on that one.
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mmcartalk
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Might reach or top 30 billion if you consider the interest lost on the money they are (or will be) paying out. I think in the end, though, it's going to force some big changes in the company....wouldn't be surprised to see them leave the American market. And that will be interesting if they are forced out before Mitsubishi LOL.