A laconic “yes” is all it took for former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler to confess responsibility in the case dieselgate which is being judged in Germany. The former director of the subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group has admitted that he knew that it was possible that the diesel engines of his vehicles were tampered with and that, despite having been able to intervene, he did not. In other words, he was aware that his company could be deceiving hundreds of thousands of drivers with souped-up engines with a software illegal that camouflaged the polluting emissions from their cars.
Stadler has acknowledged that he “accepted” the possibility of vehicles being sold with the software illegal and that “he did not inform” the partners of the Volkswagen Group, according to the brief statement that his lawyer, Ulrike Thole-Groll, read before the court that is trying him in Munich. “Yes”, she has limited herself to saying when the president of the room has asked her if those were her words. The 60-year-old former boss of the brand with the four rings is the main defendant in the first criminal trial in Germany over the worldwide scandal of dieselgate.
Stadler became in June 2018 the first major executive of the Volkswagen Group to be arrested in Germany and temporarily sent to prison for his alleged involvement in the case of engine manipulation to camouflage emissions. The scandal broke out in September 2015 in the United States and revealed that the German giant had used a software illegal on millions of vehicles.
The manager spent more than four months in pretrial detention. Until now Stadler had denied the accusations, but an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office has led to his change of strategy. In exchange for acknowledging his role in the fraud, you will see his sentence reduced. The court is expected to reach a verdict in early June after more than two and a half years of proceedings. The confession of the former head of Audi is not complete. According to the words of his lawyer, he did not know for sure that the vehicles had been tampered with, but that this was “a possibility” that he “accepted” without taking any action. In his statement, Stadler apologizes to the buyers. “I understand that, for my part, I should have been more careful,” his lawyer has read.
expected appearance
The statement of the main accused of the dieselgate It was highly anticipated after the court reported earlier this month that the prison sentence he faced would be reduced to between 1.5 and two years and a fine of €1.1 million if he confessed to the fraud. .
Three other executives are being prosecuted in the same process, and all have confessed. The court dismissed the accusation against an engineer in exchange for a fine of 25,000 euros and for him to act as a key witness to clarify what happened. Both the engine developer Giovanni Pamio and the former head of that division Wolfgang Hatz have also confessed that they supervised the design of the software so that the engines would meet legal emissions standards during testing but not on the road.
Several German prosecutors opened investigations for fraud, stock market manipulation or misleading advertising against executives from Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche after the scandal broke dieselgate in 2015. The US environmental agency EPA accused the Volkswagen Group of having installed in 11 million of its diesel vehicles – some 600,000 of them in the United States – a device capable of falsifying the results of anti-pollution tests and of concealing emissions that sometimes they were up to 40 times higher than the authorized limits.
The Volkswagen automobile group, based in the German city of Wolfsburg, was sentenced to pay a fine of 1,000 million euros for the manipulation of gas emissions in its diesel engines. The company did not appeal and said publicly that it accepted the decision, in a way of assuming its responsibility in the dieselgate.
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