Christian Strenger, a vocal critic at Volkswagen and a former member of the committee that drafted Germany’s corporate governance code, sees little chance for the company’s supervisors to expose themselves to further scrutiny. The fiscal council has only one member in 20 who is not a representative of Volkswagen’s three main shareholders or employees.
“Nothing is going to change as long as the old guard is there,” said Strenger.
The diesel scandal remains a financial burden. The company disclosed in its annual report this week that potential lawsuit liabilities, such as one of the shareholders who say the company deceived them, could cost 4.2 billion euros, or $ 5 billion. That adds to the tens of billions of euros that Volkswagen has already paid in fines and damages since 2017, after admitting that it has programmed diesel cars to produce lower emissions under test conditions than in normal use.
Investors this week were focusing on Volkswagen’s future, not its past.
In a series of appearances starting on Monday, Diess and other executives described a €35 billion plan to build six battery factories, install a global network of charging stations and employ 10,000 software engineers to work in autonomous driving and other new technologies. Volkswagen would become the largest software company in Europe, after SAP, the German manufacturer of software used by corporations to manage functions such as logistics and finance.
Volkswagen’s voting shares ended the week up 20 percent on the Frankfurt trading floor and have risen 75 percent since December, despite the company reporting a 37 percent drop in net profit in 2020 after the pandemic raged. The sales. Since 2015, shares have more than tripled.
Volkswagen also benefited from a report released this month by analysts at UBS, the Swiss bank, which classified it as the traditional automaker best positioned to compete with Tesla because it already has the capacity to mass produce electric cars economically.
Volkswagen’s advantage goes back to the decision taken at that meeting in 2015, weeks after the emissions scandal became public.
The executives authorized the development of a collection of combined components that would serve as the basis for a range of electric models, including sedans, SUVs and vans. The standardized platform, called the Modular Electrification Toolbox, could also be used by other company brands, including Audi.