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Reuters reports:
Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) pleaded guilty on Friday to fraud, obstruction of justice and falsifying statements as part of a $4.3 billion settlement reached with the U.S. Justice Department in January over the automaker's diesel emissions scandal.
It was the first time the company has pleaded guilty to criminal conduct in any court in the world.
[...] The September 2015 disclosure that VW intentionally cheated on emissions tests for at least six years led to the ouster of its chief executive, damaged the company's reputation around the world, and prompted massive bills.
In total, VW has agreed to spend up to $25 billion in the United States to address claims from owners, environmental regulators, states, and dealers, and offered to buy back about 500,000 polluting U.S. vehicles.
Volkswagen's general counsel Manfred Doess made the plea on its behalf after he said at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Detroit that he was authorized by the company's board of directors to enter a guilty plea.
[...] U.S. District Judge Sean Cox accepted the company's guilty plea to conspiracy to commit fraud, obstruction and entry of goods by false statement charges and set an April 21 sentencing date, where he must decide whether to approve the terms of the plea agreement.
Common Dreams reports:
U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being. With a strong network of researchers, advocates, organizers, and students in state capitols across the country, we take on the special interests on issues, such as product safety, political corruption, prescription drugs, and voting rights, where these interests stand in the way of reform and progress.
Statement by Mike Litt, Consumer Program Advocate at U.S. PIRG Education Fund, on today's guilty plea by Volkswagen in its criminal court case for emission violations:
"18 months after news of Volkswagen's emission scandal broke, we're glad to see the company finally admit to criminal wrongdoing. This kind of company admission is a big deal.
Next, executives responsible for defrauding consumers and government regulators should pay with jail time. The VW scandal is one of the biggest corporate crimes in history. We need to make sure executives and their companies know that crime doesn't pay.
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Saturday March 11 2017, @09:22PM
Weird.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:41PM
We now how that turns out...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:52PM (4 children)
This amounts to $5000 per vehicle unless I miscalculated. It may benefit the owners but falls far short of the damage to the ecosystem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:58PM (1 child)
You have no idea how much the 'ecosystem' was damaged, if at all.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday March 12 2017, @12:17AM
Hint: a lot less than the use of Agent Orange. And did the USians stopped using it after Vietnam?
No, history shows they are still using it, this time they even outsourced his production to Russia! What's the weirdest: these crazy USians chose to use him on themselves!
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:11PM (1 child)
falls far short of the damage to the ecosystem.
Not really, you can point-source-ify it and figure out the delta of hydrocarbons dumped in the air compared to a competitors auto, then use all the EPA rules and crap to figure out the damage.
Don't forget to credit VW with not damaging the environment by manufacturing elaborate emissions control hardware. It won't balance all the way but maybe somewhere from 10% to 50% of total damage can credit right back.
I have a toyota commuter car thats rated at 36 mpg. Because its a toyota it'll last 200K miles at least, assuming I don't crash it etc etc. That's 5555 gallons of gas. If Toyota had lied and thats 35 mpg which about the scale of this "scandal" that would be 5714 gallons of gas. 5714 - 5555 = 159 gallons of gas.
In 2013 the mayflower oil pipeline spill according to wikipedia anyway, dumped 134000 gallons of oil and the government punishment was $5.07M which is about $37.83 per gallon of oil.
At that charge rate $5000 is equivalent to 132 gallons of gas. Eh, its not unreasonable.
Most people don't care about fuel efficiency and are happy burning 10 MPG instead of my car. In that way the damage is extremely abstract in that they thought and socially signalled they were greener than me, but they're actually burning gas like a midsize sedan. Then again midsize sedan buyers don't care that they're "wasting" fossil fuels, so in reality there's not really any loss at all.
Most cars get crashed or scrapped before 200K miles.
Overall its probably a fair amount of money.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:41PM
Second, VW compliance with EPA regulations worsens the fuel economy and performance of its vehicle. This trade off has been outright ignored. Third, the pipeline spill you mentioned was fined for reasons that had nothing to do with the harm of the spill and it is apples and oranges to compare oil spilled into the environment to oil burned into mostly CO2 and H2O and then released into the environment. Fourth, VW is only being fined because it got caught by an independent party. EPA had no trouble with the violation when it was invisible to the public.
VW's violation has been turned into theater, but we have little evidence of significant harm to the environment or people, the violation meant significant benefit to VW drivers, and regulators were suspiciously lax on looking for violations of the law in the first place. I believe this to be a terrible precedent for either punishing polluters or any sort of business regulatory reform.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday March 11 2017, @11:58PM (4 children)
It pales in significance against subprime mortgage crisis.
And set a precedent? What are the chances?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:20AM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @02:24AM (1 child)
The U.S. passed laws that forced banks to make bad loans
That didn't happen.
You need to switch off the Reactionary (hate) radio.
It's filling your head with nonsense and rotting your brain.
What the law did was forbid red-lining.
Banksters now had to -consider- folks that they had previously excluded via acts of gross prejudice.
They were NOT required to GRANT a loan to anyone who did not pose a reasonable risk.
Due diligence still applied and someone doing his job properly would have weeded out the bad risks.
The thing is that the banks didn't hold those loans any longer that it took to bundle them and sell them to some sucker with excess wealth and no brains.
(Did you get stuck buying some of that junk? Is that why you're so irritated?)
The banksters who held onto the bad loans--which they knew from the start were crap--hedged their bets and bet against the crap loans and they didn't lose anything.
The "only" thing that suffered was the housing market and the national (and world) economy.
On top of that was robo-signing of foreclosure documents, in violation of federal law.
(By not actually knowing what the law is, local cops and courts were complicit in this.)
Trump has a criminal in his cabinet [google.com] who got rich doing this stuff.
Yeah, a big part of the problem came from USA.gov making the buyers of the bundles whole again--actually, beyond whole--rather than letting them eat their bad gambling debts.
...and, of course, Dubya's and O'Bummer's DoJ not sending the fraudsters to prison, or putting them on trial, or even charging them.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 12 2017, @03:17AM
You mean... like pension fund managers naive enough to believe credit rating agencies which used to be reliable in the past?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:44AM
How soon we forget.
The S&L fraudsters of the 1980s and 1990s did prison time. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @12:51AM
I the person ultimately responsible going to get free room and board and a striped cloths, or a pink parachute?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sulla on Sunday March 12 2017, @12:51AM (5 children)
Good, now we send the corporation to jail for a decade. No money transfers or sales, that includes the liquidation of assets. All assets frozen. This will negatively effect anyone invested in them but thats the risk you take when investing in a corporation. Maybe people would be a little more cautious investing in Dow Chem knowing they could be jailed if a plant explodes and kills people due to neglegance. Maybe Wells Fargo might lose some investors because having their money frozen is more important than the ROI from the fake records scandal.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:48AM (4 children)
Ineffective. Just take one plebeian and pay him a good salary for as long as s/he free. Call her/him the "scapegoat CEO"
Make her/him sign any and all the troublesome papers. When s/he gets in jail, just hire another.
Good luck with that - little assets of importance in US, the best one can do is to slap the corporate with... I don't know... $25B fine.
Maybe not quite a piece of cake, but survivable.
Aand... US will get to import the necessary chemicals/pharma from India (protectionist taxes will hit the USian public, too little electoral support for the orange agent)
Too late for that, it was US which promoted globalization and free capital movement like crazy... and the capital moved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Sunday March 12 2017, @04:07AM (1 child)
To the first thing you said, we already have that in Sarbanes-Oxley. What I am talking is treating corporations like the people they legally are. All the people are free to do whatever they want, but the assets of the corporation are frozen.
I say this as someone who identifies as a capitalist. If corps are people they need to face the same punishments as people.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @08:54AM
When I was a kid, if I broke the rules...
"You don't get dessert tonight. Nor will you watch TV. "
I guess the corporate equivalent would be:
"We will no longer enforce compliance with your copyrights or intellectual property being as you do not handle them well."
Loss of the corporate teeth enforcing their monopolies would wake them up big-time.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday March 12 2017, @11:47AM (1 child)
> Maybe not quite a piece of cake, but survivable.
Decreasing the company value will deter investors, so there could be some positive feedback which makes it have a greater net cost to them in the short-to-medium term.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by fubari on Sunday March 12 2017, @07:45PM
Just for context: compare the $25B fine to VW AG's current market capitalization of $65B [macroaxis.com].
Looking back to pre-scandal (early 2015) their market cap was closer to $120B.
fwiw, I own one of the cheating Passat diesels. Great car, hope they come out with a viable fix for my model.
I expect VW to do well. Unless... how many other countries will pile on the (deserved) fines, maybe causing VW to go bankrupt. Don't know, I suppose these are exciting times to be a VW employee.