The Chief Legal Officer of the Volkswagen Group is to become the new Group Board Member for Integrity and Law.
(Photo: imago images / Sven Simon)
Düsseldorf, Berlin At Volkswagen, the next change in the Group’s Board of Management is on the horizon. As reported from corporate circles at the weekend, Manfred Döss, 63, is to become the new Group Board Member for Integrity and Law. The lawyer would succeed Hiltrud Werner, 55, who is not supposed to get a new contract and is expected to leave the post at the end of January after five years. The group did not want to comment on the information.
Döss comes from within the Volkswagen Group’s own ranks and has made a name for himself as chief legal officer, especially in dealing with the diesel scandal. For almost six years, Döss has also been the legal director of Porsche SE in Stuttgart. This is the holding company in which the Porsche / Piëch family have bundled their shares in the Volkswagen Group. The Austrians hold 53 percent of the voting rights in the Wolfsburg-based automaker through this holding company.
Volkswagen set up the integrity department after the diesel scandal became known in late summer 2015 in order to prevent an affair of a similar magnitude a second time. The current legal director, Hiltrud Werner, has set up new control systems and training processes in the company, with which further violations of the law at Volkswagen and its subsidiaries are to be excluded in the future.
In the summer, plans were circulating in Wolfsburg for the first time that the integrity and legal department could be dissolved again after a good five years. The various areas should therefore be divided among other board departments such as finance and human resources. Hiltrud Werner would have been a victim of her own success: the new control systems work, the board department would have made itself superfluous.
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Above all in the USA, where the diesel scandal originated, such plans met with incomprehension. Volkswagen has made progress in overcoming the diesel scandal and is well on the way to becoming a different company, according to environmental authorities in Washington and the US monitor, which had monitored the Volkswagen Group for more than three years. But there are good reasons to let the board department exist longer. The new control and security systems would have to prove themselves over a number of years.
Further personnel changes on the board of directors
According to the latest deliberations from Wolfsburg, the car manufacturer is now sticking to the board department, but is planning to move from Hiltrud Werner to Manfred Döss. As Volkswagen’s chief legal advisor, Döss is currently reporting directly to his responsible member of the Board of Management, Hiltrud Werner. He will probably give up his position as a member of the executive board at Porsche SE. He would get a three-year contract on the corporate board.
The VW Group is facing further personnel changes on the executive board. Hauke Stars, previously a board member at Deutsche Börse AG, could take over the new IT department in Wolfsburg. It is also planned that Ralf Brandstätter, head of the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand, will be promoted to the Group’s top management body. Final decisions could be made in a board meeting on Thursday.
More: Hauke Stars is set to become Volkswagen’s new IT director