(Bloomberg) -- Nine years after the diesel emission scandal that rocked Volkswagen AG, the man running Europe‘s biggest carmaker at the time is finally standing trial accused of fraud.
Former Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn appeared in a German court on Tuesday to defend himself against several criminal allegations in a trial that’s set to last 12 months. Along with four others, Winterkorn was charged in 2019 with fraud for having VW vehicles equipped with emissions-cheating technology.
The diesel affair sparked global outrage and triggered Winterkorn’s departure from the company in September 2015, just days after U.S. authorities disclosed their investigation. VW has paid more than €30 billion ($33 billion) over the scandal.
While in the US former VW managers were swiftly tried and convicted, Germany has taken years to bring people allegedly involved to justice. Winterkorn, 77, has always denied any allegations he knew about the scam.
His lawyer Felix Dörr told reporters on Tuesday that his client rejects the allegations. Winterkorn will address the court on Wednesday, he added.
“We’re confident that we’ll be able to rebut the allegations,” Dörr said. “We will do so by working chapter through chapter of this case.”
Winterkorn’s charges were separated from the four other managers due to health issues that made him unfit to stand trial. The case against the other four has been ongoing since 2021, and more hearings have been scheduled until January 2025.
Winterkorn isn’t charged with being involved in inventing the so-called defeat device but only with not stopping its use once he learned about it — thus allowing 9 million cars to be sold with the software in Europe and the U.S., causing a total of €100 million harm to customers.
The second indictment alleges that Winterkorn and two other then-board members informed markets too late about the diesel-emission rigging. While his two colleagues, ex-CEO Herbert Diess and VW chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch, settled in 2020, the criminal case against Winterkorn was dropped the following year on the grounds that prosecutors wanted to prioritize the fraud trial.
At the end of 2023 the court, acting at the request of prosecutors, decided to revive the market-manipulation indictment. A medical expert who examined Winterkorn concluded that the former CEO would be fit to stand trial by September.
The third charge was filed by Berlin prosecutors in 2021. They allege Winterkorn lied while testifying at a parliamentary inquiry in January 2017.
The trial started with prosecutors reading the indictments, detailing how and when Winterkorn first learned about the scam. They listed a memo from May 2014 that he received as part of a package of material he wanted to work through on a weekend. The document contained information about tests in the U.S. exposing that VW’s diesel-cars emissions were 15 to 35 times higher than allowed, according to prosecutors.
As the situation in the U.S. began to heat up because California’s clear-air agency Carb stepped in, VW managers discussed the situation with Winterkorn at a July 2015 meeting. An executive told Winterkorn on the phone earlier that day that “we screwed” the U.S. authorities. According to the indictment, one presentation at the meeting was titled “What Carb doesn’t yet know.”
Winterkorn was also charged in the U.S. in 2018. But since Germany doesn’t extradite its own citizens to countries outside the European Union, he remains safe from that prosecution if he stays within German borders.
(Adds defense lawyer statement in fifth paragraph.)
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