Via GCR:
VW engineer gets 40 months in jail, $200K fine, for diesel cheating role
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/111 ... ating-roleFormer Volkswagen employee James Liang was sentenced in Detroit on Friday to serve 40 months in prison and pay a $200,000 fine for his role in the global Volkswagen diesel-emission cheating scandal. It was a stiffer sentence than expected for an engineer who helped to create software that controlled exhaust emissions only when Volkswagen and Audi's TDI diesel cars detected they were being tested on rolling roads.
Prosecutors had recommended, according to The Detroit News, a sentence of three years in federal prison and a fine of $20,000. Defense attorneys had suggested the 63-year-old engineer should receive home confinement and a nominal fee instead.
The tough sentence appears to send a message from U.S. District Judge Sean Cox that employees can and should be held accountable for misdeeds they commit for their corporate employers.
“We haven’t seen many individuals being held responsible for corporate misconduct," Wayne State University law professor and former federal prosecutor Peter Henning told the News, "so this is one of those rare cases.”
The sentence makes it even less likely that six VW Group executives also indicted for their roles in the diesel scandal will ever return to the U.S. Germany does not normally extradite its citizens to other countries, so they were not expected to face trial; Liang's sentence makes that possibility even more remote. . . .
Via ABG:
VW CEO reportedly learned of diesel cheating a month before board knew
And this was two months before it became public.
https://www.autoblog.com/2017/08/25/vw- ... ng-report/A former senior quality manager at Volkswagen has told investigators he informed then-CEO Martin Winterkorn on July 27, 2015, that the carmaker had "cheated" during emissions tests in the United States, German media reported on Friday.
VW has said its executive board did not learn about the severity of emissions test cheating using illegal software until late August 2015. . . .
According to a report by German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and broadcasters NDR and WDR published on Friday, the unidentified quality manager told German and U.S. investigators that Winterkorn phoned him on July 27 to enquire about problems with the certification of new models in the United States. He says he then told the CEO that VW had "cheated" in the United States, the report said.
VW declined to comment on the report. Winterkorn's lawyer was not immediately available for comment.
Winterkorn in January declined to tell German lawmakers when he first learned about systematic exhaust emissions cheating but said it was no earlier than VW had officially disclosed. . . .