The Volkswagen Group has completed a multi-year internal investigation into Dieselgate and says it will seek compensation from former CEO Martin Winterkorn and former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler to offset some of the enormous financial damage that resulted from the emissions fraud scandal.
The Volkswagen law firm hired to conduct the investigation covered more than 65 petabytes of data, including about 480 million documents. About 1.6 million of these files were “identified as relevant, selected and reviewed”, says the German automaker. The law firm also conducted 1,550 interviews and reviewed files of lawsuits and prosecutors around the world, resulting from the company’s actions. The internal investigation was “by far the most comprehensive and complex investigation carried out on a company in German economic history”, writes Volkswagen.
Winterkorn resigned from Volkswagen in September 2015, almost immediately after news of the scandal. He was later arrested in Germany and accused not only of knowing that the company’s diesel cars had software that deceived regulators, but also of sitting for a year on the discovery of the fraud by the Environmental Protection Agency. Winterkorn was also charged in the United States, but he is unlikely to be extradited. He remains on trial in Germany.
Stadler was arrested in 2018 by German authorities, prompting Audi to postpone the unveiling of its first all-electric car, the E-Tron. Stadler was later forced to leave his position by Volkswagen.
Volkswagen said on Friday that it is also seeking compensation from four other former board members: Ulrich Hackenberg and Stefan Knirsch (Audi), Wolfgang Hatz (Porsche) and Heinz-Jakob Neusser (Volkswagen) – the latter has been criminally accused by the Department of Justice.
The end of the investigation is something that Volkswagen will undoubtedly aim to move forward whenever Dieselgate is mentioned. The company has spent the past five years since the scandal broke, trying to distance itself from its deceptive and damaging actions and, in many ways, tried to attribute it to individual actors. (The former CEO of his American division once witnessed for the congress in 2015 which was the work of “some software engineers who [did it] for any reason. ”He resigned five months later.)
At a minimum, Volkswagen is now the largest legacy car manufacturer making the most concentrated effort on electric vehicles, and recently increased its investment in space to $ 86 billion.