The continuing criminal enterprise called Volkswagen is stonewalling, pretending low-level engineers phonied up emission controls and top management knew nothing about it. Such evasion is comically absurd. By their arrogance and stupidity, top management at Volkswagen is guaranteeing criminal investigations worldwide as well as crushing class action suits and huge fines. By now, many of them are quite justifiably worried about going to prison and asset forfeiture. If top Volkswagen management wants to play hardball, then hardball is precisely they will get. From dozens of directions at once. Unceasingly.
What VW has done is almost certainly control fraud, the deliberate looting of a company by top-level management, using fraud to cook the books so the company has illusory profits, which they profit from with big salaries and stock options. In this case, VW faked emissions reports so cars could be built cheaper with fraudulent emissions and mpg ratings, boosting sales. VW pretended to have a highly efficient diesel engine. It didn’t. They lied.
Kevin Drum:
This is ridiculous. What incentive do low-level engineers and technicians have to do th is on their own? Hell, they couldn’t even take on a project like this unless their managers OKed the time to do it, and their managers wouldn’t do it unless they were being pressed by higher-ups. Anybody who’s ever worked at a big corporation knows this perfectly well.
Bloomberg:
The criteria, outcomes and engineering of cars that missed emissions targets were overseen by managers at Volkswagen’s base in Wolfsburg, according to the people who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.