Dusseldorf They were half judgments, half homilies. When the lawyers at Volkswagen AG opened their mail in year three of the diesel affair, they had to take a deep breath. The group cheated its customers, according to the Nuremberg district court. Volkswagen’s “profit striving at the price of deliberately deceiving consumers and authorities is to be regarded as reprehensible,” said Düsseldorf. A judge in Stuttgart criticized Volkswagen for violating “the sense of decency of all those who think cheaply and fairly”.
Volkswagen, once the pride of the German automobile industry, had become a cesspool in the eyes of the judges. The group’s diesel vehicles were defective, its management morally unfit and legally responsible, was the credo of numerous judgments. Volkswagen countered that the judgments were considered to be incorrect and that a correction was expected. Then it was better to aim for a comparison.
In this episode of Handelsblatt Crime, our reporters report on how the biggest scandal in the German auto industry became the biggest comparison in German legal history. More than a quarter million customers joined a so-called model declaratory lawsuit to force Volkswagen to correct a massive fraud: selling millions of supposedly green vehicles when in fact they were polluting.
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It cost more than 800 million euros. Further, far higher bills are still pending. An investor process is underway in Braunschweig. In addition to the model plaintiff Deka Investment, various other institutional investors are involved. Their demand: almost ten billion euros. The judge must decide whether Volkswagen informed investors in good time about the scandal surrounding millions of manipulated diesel engines. There is much to suggest that this did not happen.
If there was a man who could have made sure of that, it was him: Martin Winterkorn. All-powerful boss of Volkswagen for many years, much praised and highly paid. In the podcast, we trace his path from humble circumstances to the top of the world’s largest car manufacturer. And his case. In the eye of the storm, Winterkorn suddenly no longer wanted to be what he was always known to be: omniscient, omnipresent, involved in everything. He now has to represent this thesis in the dock.
Handelsblatt Crime appears every 14 days and can be heard wherever there are podcasts.
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More: You can hear the last episode of Handelsblatt Crime here.