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Audi CEO Arrested for Role in Volkswagen Diesel Emissions Scandal

posted by martyb on Monday June 18 2018, @06:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the "rogue-engineer" dept.

takyon writes:

Head of VW's Audi arrested in Germany over diesel scandal

German authorities arrested the head of Volkswagen's luxury arm Audi on Monday, the most senior company official so far to be detained over the carmaker's emissions test cheating scandal.

Munich prosecutors, who earlier this month widened their probe into Audi, said Rupert Stadler was being held due to fears he might hinder their investigation into the scandal, plunging Volkswagen into a leadership crisis.

News of the arrest comes as Volkswagen's (VW) new group CEO Herbert Diess is trying to introduce a new leadership structure, which includes Stadler, to speed up a shift toward electric vehicles in the wake of its "dieselgate" troubles.

Also at BBC, DW, The Register, and CNN.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @02:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @02:33PM (#695009)

    You're a fucking idiot along with everybody else in this thread.

    If senior management knew about the fake accounts and did nothing or worse, covered it up, they should go to jail. But we have no evidence of that. In fact, senior management had incentives to boost revenue and profit. Fake accounts don't increase revenue. Even before fines, they decrease profits. And we have no evidence of unusual insider sales or exercises while Wall Street was being duped.

    Management instituted bad incentives and went up and down with everyone else. Lots of them were fired as the company faced civil consequences. It would be absurd to jail people for something they (a) did not know about and (b) had incentives to know about.

    I think there are a few reasons that no one from senior management of a major bank went to jail related to RMBS. One reason is that the Justice department lost its first big case which was brought against two hedge fund managers from Bear Sterns. Typically prosecutors only bring cases they think they can win and this may have shown that prosecuting a lot of these cases was going to be hard.

    The second reason is a bit of informed speculation on my part. Our banks have a very symbiotic relationship with Washington, especially when it comes to RMBS. The role of the GSEs is especially important here since they in large part determine lending standards. And once you are there eventually there will be politicians involved. While I would have love to seen Barney Frank being called to testify at a trial it was never going to happen. Trying to cleanly slice off the prosecution of a few bank CEOs was always going to be impossible because of where it would lead.

    RenTec is hardly the first people to have a dispute with the IRS. Berkshire Hathaway won a $500M dispute with them last year.

    Also several high-profile executives such as Angelo Mozillo settled for high fines and bars from financial services as a result of SEC enforcement. You can find some of the relevant SEC enforcement actions and their outcomes here https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/enf-actions-fc.shtml [sec.gov] although that page appears a little out of date.

    There were to my knowledge prosecutions also for mortgage fraud etc but just in and of themselves ill-conceived securitizations constitute a fraud.

    TURN OFF THE SOCIAL MEDIA MORON AND PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING