Good for Germany, but it is all too rare to see bad corporate behaviour punished like this. Steal £10k from a company, and you will probably go to prison for a long time. Start a company and steal billions from your customers and/or the tax payer, and you will probably get away with it. I believe Iceland was the only country to jail bankers after the 2008 banking disaster. We are still waiting for the British government to bring any individuals to account for wide scale corruption and profiteering during COVID.
It took 10 yrs to convict them mind you, and as I understand it they’re all out now.
hermitcrab · 13h ago
I stand corrected. Thanks.
ferguess_k · 16h ago
窃(Steal)钩(hook)者(people)诛(gets a death sentence)
窃(Steal)国(country)者(people)侯(gets to be the king)
OJFord · 16h ago
Is this missing a sentence like 'there is a saying in mandarin:'?
docsaintly · 15h ago
I think they meant:
窃钩者诛，窃国者侯
qiègōuzhě zhū, qièguózhě hóu
He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord.
Yes, it is a Chinese idiom.
anthk · 15h ago
The same in Spanish. Steal a hen, get a harsh sentence. Steal millions, you are now a respectable 'businessman'.
atrocious · 14h ago
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
pezezin · 8h ago
I am Spanish and I have never heard this proverb...
Gibbon1 · 14h ago
Kill a man you're a murderer. Kill millions and you're a statesman.
moomin · 13h ago
Pretty sure that’s known as The Blair Doctrine.
appreciatorBus · 11h ago
Or the Stalin doctrine, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic"
ferguess_k · 10h ago
Yeah it was a Chinese saying.
echelon · 15h ago
This is a remarkably good idiom that rings true.
Similar to Paul Getty's quote, "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
But in this case, it cuts much deeper and darker.
Brian_K_White · 14h ago
I think that's a pretty different concept being expressed by that one.
The others are about getting away with something by just making the crime big enough that it's evaluated and handled in a totally different arena.
The bank can still destroy the rest of your life, so you didn't get away with anything (setting aside bankrupcy and how you can actually usually start over, and that may or may not be all that terrible for you).
The banking one is just saying that the bank can not get 100 million from you no matter what they do, because it simply doesn't exist. In that case, everyone still agrees you still owe it and they are entitled to it. You didn't gain anything by going big enough. And it's not really true that it's the banks problem instead of yours. The bank has a problem, but you still also have a problem.
bryanrasmussen · 14h ago
that's really not what it means, it means that if you owe the bank enough money (which is probably more than 100 million nowadays for any significant bank) then it is you in the position of power in relation to the bank, when the bank comes and says hey we need the money sure you have the "problem" that you need to pay it, but let's say you can pay it no sweat, but you'd rather not because reasons so you say hmm, I think I would like to renegotiate the interest and wait a year before paying, and unless things are very extreme the bank will probably have to acquiesce, if they don't they are basically letting the world know hey, we have a 100 million dollar problem, but until they make that announcement that 100 million is just another asset the bank has.
If you owe the bank enough money, you have the power in the relationship in most cases.
WalterBright · 8h ago
> If you owe the bank enough money, you have the power in the relationship in most cases.
If you have any assets, the bank can take them from you.
The thing about renegotiating a loan is you don't have enough assets, but if the bank takes what you do have, you will never be able to repay the loan. I.e. the bank stands to recover more if you are successful than if you are bankrupt.
bryanrasmussen · 15m ago
>If you have any assets, the bank can take them from you
If you have any assets in the less than a billion dollars range, if you have assets over a billion dollars (which if you have enough of a loan in today's money to match the 100 million quote, you probably have over a billion in assets) then the bank knows its looking at a real fight. Nobody likes a real fight.
People like fights they're guaranteed to win quickly.
cjbenedikt · 14h ago
"...setting aside bankrupcy and how you can actually usually start over, and that may or may not be all that terrible for you..." You might even be elected president...:-p
achierius · 14h ago
"He who steals from one citizen,” said Cato, “ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from all ends them in purple and gold.”
mananaysiempre · 13h ago
> “Fures,” inquit [Cato], “privatorum furtorum in nervo atque in compedibus aetatem agunt, fures publici in auro atque in purpura.”
Usually it happens only if you steal from investors. Stealing from consumers is fine.
benoau · 15h ago
We’re in the midst of watching Apple get away with criminal contempt for forcing consumers to be as ignorant as possible of their IAP fees - including forcing Patreon to exclusively use them while under court order to allow them to link to their own payments!
M95D · 13h ago
The american corporations were always "special".
tyre · 15h ago
Matt Levine:
“I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”
Brian_K_White · 14h ago
Similarly Elizabeth Holmes (In jail, but not for providing bad medical services.)
No comments yet
immibis · 13h ago
Obviously the solution is to buy one share in every company.
rsynnott · 1h ago
Or just one share in a whole-of-market index fund.
immibis · 54m ago
I suspect you need an actual share in the company to qualify for shareholder protections. A share in a fund is a share in a fund, not a share in each company the fund has shares in.
bilekas · 16h ago
This comment is so on point, reminds me of the old one about if you owe the bank 500k they own you, but if you owe then 2Billion you own them. Something along those lines, maybe I'm only noticing it more recently but it seems to me that there's also a higher prevalence of "Non class actions" clauses in terms and conditions these days too.
It's amazing how badly customers are willing to be treated but at the same time, you're not obliged to buy a service so I can't really rant too much.
Edit : Found the quote and unironically it's credited as an American Proverb.
> If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb.
Stealing from employees is just normal business in the US. $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered for US workers between 2021 and 2023. Imagine how much wasn't recovered. It is often the least able to take action/most in need of every dollar of their income that are stolen from. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats those with the least power versus those with power.
That seems like a really small number? To compare - total US retail shrink in those years combined was a little over $300B[0] - averaging about 1.5% of sales. $1.5B seems like a rounding error when talking in those terms.
I think their point was that this was all that was recovered, from the approx $20b stolen each year through wage theft. I believe wage theft is one of the largest value crime by $ amount in the US - but is very rarely prosecuted.
Actually it turns out fraud and white collar crime takes more out of the American economy.
speff · 15h ago
I skimmed the article - any significant concrete numbers were all sourced to the EPI site linked by the GP. There's an unsourced FBI chart that says >19B in 2012, but I couldn't find the actual numbers when I looked. Frankly - I don't trust this claim if the only one actually putting big numbers on it is one publication.
EDIT: I'm going to cast more suspicion on the FBI graph. According to a 2022 report[0], the number of robbery offenses reported in 2018 was 1691 cases. The median loss being about $2k. Doing some caveman-math, that's about $3B lost to robbery in 2018. Unless we went through some insane spike of lawlessness between 2012 and 2018, I don't see how $340m in 2012 jumps to $3B in 2018.
Caveman math indeed. Thanks for the correction - that's a pretty big error. Though then I'm not sure what to make of the discrepancy between the numbers. They still don't square up w/ the Wikipedia article any way you look at it
_DeadFred_ · 13h ago
You are comparing ACTUAL recovered wage theft numbers to industry trade group estimated numbers and making claims/drawing conclusions off of two totally differently types of numbers?
That business appears to steal as much from their workers as criminal theft rings surely is kind of a big deal (based on the matching ACTUAL recovery numbers).
throwpoaster · 16h ago
Let's be conservative by taking GDP for only the middle year. In 2022 American GDP was 26 trillion (rounded down). Let's also gross up the stolen wages from your comment to 2.6 billion.
That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and the reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.
If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!
ljf · 15h ago
Wage theft takes more money out of people's pockets than robbery, auto theft, burglary and larceny combined.
Should we not care about them as they are such a small part of gdp?
We all know employees generate more revenue than what they're paid.
Otherwise you wouldn't have a successful business.
Comparing wages with GDP in this context doesn't prove anything.
_DeadFred_ · 13h ago
The RECOVERED number matches retail theft recovery numbers. So it is AT LEAST on par with organized and unorganized criminal retail theft. I'd say that is significant (I would argue retail theft if much easier to catch and pursued much more often, making wage theft a larger issue) especially as it's happening within the structure of/approved by businesses.
I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand your point? Does it being a small % of the GDP matter to those stolen from? Does it mean we shouldn't attempt to remedy it?
throwpoaster · 15h ago
We should care about it 0.002% as much as we care about other economic problems.
ToValueFunfetti · 14h ago
Not quite- from a strictly financial perspective, it means we should care 0.002% as much as we care about an intervention that doubles the GDP or eliminates 100% it. Neither exists, so we're better off comparing to other theft- this is about 15% of numbers for retail shrink, 50% of reported personal theft, so this suggests we should care proportionally.
But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.
3eb7988a1663 · 17h ago
SBF stole from rich people. Strategic error on his part.
fuddy · 14h ago
His larger problem was doing everything a lawyer would tell you not to do. The world and a sufficient portion of any 12 person subsample could have accepted that these were suckers far more readily than Madoff's victims. But he broke every rule about talking, letting people know he was making up required departments, mixing conflicts of interest, etc.
tcgv · 15h ago
True, but context matters. SBF was running a disruptive crypto startup that drew intense scrutiny, and his operations were so amateurish that proving misconduct was straightforward. Traditional corporations tend to reduce the risk of prison-worthy exposure thanks to tighter compliance and better legal insulation, even when the harm is just as large.
HenryBemis · 15h ago
With the political tensions in the US (I'm not trying to fan any flames - wait to read the full thing), I think that SBF made the mistake to 'bet on both teams - with a smile', and he is punished because teamA that eventually won punished him for funding teamB as well. So a friend of our enemy is our enemy (!?). Also, he may have been seen as a 'traitor' by both teams. I know about the case what I've read in some news sites and Coffeezilla/Voidzilla, and it seems like the guy should be behind bars. And with that said, I rarely celebrate when someone loses their freedom. I mostly feel sorry for them and their life's choices (and the fact that with being in prison he made his own life hell, and put in some very difficult position everyone near/around him).
AtlasBarfed · 14h ago
He'll be pardoned.
But at least he's there for a bit
izacus · 17h ago
The question is, whether VW as a German company is now going to end up being beaten by US competitors which could do even more nasty stuff unpunished.
pqtyw · 16h ago
What US competitors? Tesla is the only single American company that has had any success besides maybe Ford (but Ford Europe has a similar relationship to it's American parent company that Opel and GM used to have i.e. in a large part it's an European company)
neilv · 14h ago
I'm not sure only the German market was meant by OP.
VW has international sales, and OP's implication might've been that Germany has a national interest in VW being competitive.
pqtyw · 13h ago
> only the German market
Well yes, I of course meant the entire EU+UK market. Regardless besides US and a handful of other countries VW is hardly competing that much with any American car companies anywhere (besides Tesla).
American car makers are still struggling a lot more in relative market share terms (GM+Ford+Tesla barely had over 33% in 2024 in the US). While VW alone had 26% in EU/UK/EFTA (just German companies have 39% of the entire market there)
lucianbr · 17h ago
It has been some years since VW had to give up cheating on emission tests. Were they beaten by US competitors during this time? I have not read any news about it.
JW_00000 · 15h ago
Indeed, Dieselgate is 10 years ago. If they would've suffered badly from it, we would've seen that by now. Sure, they've had to pay fines and compensations, but that seems to have been dealt with. In fact, you could argue the opposite: Dieselgate forced VW to drop diesel and switch focus to EVs [1, 2], earlier than they would've done otherwise, giving them an advantage over other European and American competitors (except Tesla). Of course, there are plenty of other issues they've faced since them (inflation, Chinese competition, tariffs, etc).
> Of course, there are plenty of other issues they've faced since them (inflation, Chinese competition, tariffs, etc).
Yeah, they're actually not doing well at all right now.
rurban · 16h ago
VW? Everyone who used the Bosch ECU cheated. VW was just the biggest who got caught and had to go to jail therefore. All the others, which were more guilty than the VW execs are still free.
And the politicians which sanctioned these special diesel tests were not even named. Nor all the other countries who also choose the European Standard (not testing diesel engines) over the US Standard.
KennyBlanken · 15h ago
Not just Bosch ECUs, not just European car companies, and this shit has been going on for decades. All the car companies do it and have since at least the 90's. The proof is in the ROM dumps of all the various cars - the tuners can point to two sets of tables of fuel mixture/timing maps, one for when the ECU thinks it's being emissions tested and one for regular use.
As early as the late 90's tuners offered features where doing something with the cruise control buttonss which would switch the engine computer back to stock programming to pass emissions, run on cheaper gas, or fool the dealer if it went in for service. How does everyone think they were able to do stuff like that without any hardware mods?
Oh, and all the car companies were self-reporting their CO2 emissions in the EU for decades. When EU regulators actually got around to testing cars, shockigly, the companies were lying.
It's basically accepted at this point that Telsa lies about their range and efficiency numbers, and recently there's evidence they have been fucking with people's odometers for the purpose of getting them out of warranty quicker.
Ferrari have all sorts of terms and prohibitions on things journalists can't do with their cars - one being track lap time testing. Why? Because they got caught by Top Gear specially modifying their cars for the Top Gear test circuit, as well as using tires that aren't on the production vehicles - and when Top Gear called them out, Ferrari permanently banned them *and have gone so far as to prohibit Ferrari owners from allowing Top Gear staff access to the owner's vehicles for testing, under threat of being blacklisted. Now that they've been caught cheating, they simply won't allow anyone to test their cars versus anyone else's.
They have kind of abandoned diesel engines, which the whole scandal was based around. It became clear that it would be impossible to create diesel engines which would comply with enviromental standards, which is a shame since they are more efficient and it is consumers who are losing out. They are still one of the main automotive conglomerations today. If anything American car companies are losing the market in Europe, Ford for example have abandoned their best selling model - the Focus, and in the UK at least they are the only US brand besides for Tesla.
amanaplanacanal · 16h ago
Consumers still have to breathe though. I'd be totally fine if diesel engines were completely phased out. In the US we somehow can't even get rid of those idiots that retune their engines for "rolling coal".
linksnapzz · 15h ago
Everything you purchase over the course of a day was transported by a diesel truck at some point.
mikestew · 15h ago
It wasn’t transported with the neighbor’s truck down the street that has a “defeat device”.
nickff · 13h ago
Parent was talking about commercial diesel trucks which do not comply with the same regulations as passenger vehicles, and the article talks about stock non-compliance. Why are you changing the subject?
KennyBlanken · 15h ago
Which likely was very polluting, because thanks to bitching by the trucking industry, they get a pass on emissions via "gliders."
They can buy a brand new truck sans engine and drop some terribly polluting piece of crap from several decades ago and bypass all modern emissions regulations.
paganel · 16h ago
You can’t wage modern war without diesel engines, those trucks won’t drive themselves close to the front-lines (and, no, electric-powered trucks in times of war are a terrible idea, and the ones powered by gasoline are a lot less efficient and don’t provide the same torque numbers).
joker99 · 16h ago
Valid points you’re making. Let me make a counter point: as a German, I’ve seen tanks on 5/6 occasions in my life, never using their own engines. But at the same time, I’ve seen hundreds of cars every day and breathed their emissions. It’s totally fine if tanks continue using diesel, but cars, trucks etc. not using diesel (or gas) engines anymore will have a measurable effect on my health
lukan · 15h ago
I actually would also prefer modern stealth tanks battery or hydrogen/fuel cell powered.
Otherwise good point.
paganel · 13h ago
But then you'd also lose the capability of making diesel engines for good, and, again, they're not used only for tanks when it comes to warfare.
Just look at the hole the US has dug for itself when it stopped producing civilian sea-ships, nowadays the cost of producing or even repairing its war-oriented sea-ships is way too high. And not only that, but it doesn't have the people with the knowhow to build those ships anymore, no matter the money thrown at the problem.
ndsipa_pomu · 2h ago
That doesn't make much sense as military technology typically comes first before any civilian application. Also, it would imply that we should already have lost the capability of making tank tracks as civilian vehicles don't use them.
paganel · 1h ago
> have lost the capability of making tank tracks
Western Europe has certainly lost the capability of making even artillery shells at scale, let alone tank tracks, just look where we're at it now.
> as military technology typically comes first before any civilian application.
Diesel himself wasn't involved in any military thing, as far as I know, so I think you're wrong on that one.
The thing is that without a strong civilian industrial base focused on things adjacent to warfare (like the steel industry when it comes to building ships or artillery shells) any big power is going to come very short-handed in the next big war (assuming the war doesn't get nuclear, which is another discussion). So, if your country can't make diesel engines at scale, for whatever reason, then you can say goodbye to your logistics lines because you need lots and lots of trucks for said logistics as part of a continental war, i.e. forget the tanks.
ndsipa_pomu · 46m ago
> Western Europe has certainly lost the capability of making even artillery shells at scale
Must be due to the lack of demand for civilian artillery shells, right?
Gud · 15h ago
Why would electric trucks be a terrible idea in war time?
WalterBright · 8h ago
I'm not a tank expert, but my impression of Wehrmacht tanks vs Soviet tanks is the Wehrmacht tanks used aviation engines. Aviation engines are light and powerful, but don't have much life, were finicky, and require aviation gas. Soviet tanks were simple and used any liquid that would burn.
nradov · 15h ago
The US military is starting to use some hybrid vehicles to improve fuel logistics and reduce operating noise. But pure electric ground vehicles are obviously a stupid idea for combat usage due to charging issues.
amalcon · 14h ago
Short version is that you can't rely on the power grid or other centralized generation. Centralized infrastructure may not even be available, but if it is then the enemy can target it.
AshleyGrant · 16h ago
Because, for the most part, we aren't doing damned thing about it. "Rolling coal" is inherently a very public act of law breaking, but I doubt a single person has ever been pulled over by any American cop for it. The EPA and certain states were trying through other enforcement mechanisms to fight it, but with Trump in office, it's basically encouraged to "delete" your Diesel emissions equipment if you aren't in commercial operation.
linksnapzz · 15h ago
…said deletion, which returns your truck to the state of the regulatory art circa 2009, also results in a doubling of fuel economy and about an 80% jump in horsepower.
Interesco · 15h ago
These percentages seem a bit high compared to what I have seen. I usually see/hear about a 1-3mpg and 10-30% HP. I understand the point you are trying to make but "doubling of fuel economy and about an 80% jump in horsepower" is far from accurate, especially considering the downsides of a delete on every outside of the vehicle
lucianbr · 16h ago
I could be wrong but I think BMW and Mercedes still make diesel engines. So maybe it's only impossible at a lower price point? Although the difference isn't that large.
Symbiote · 16h ago
Using [1], BMW have 87 models, of which 13 can be electric, 13 plug-in hybrid, 47 petrol and just 6 diesel. The six are all SUVs.
Mercedes don't have an easy filter, but they do have some cars available with diesel engines, e.g. C-Class.
Diesel is now down to 9.5% of new cars sold in Europe (Q1 2025), less than full EVs ([2]).
They do make them, but they don't sell them in the USA any more. Nobody does.
FridayoLeary · 16h ago
Even VW never stopped selling diesel cars, but they are certainly being phased out everywhere and it's not as popular as it once was.
tonyedgecombe · 16h ago
The funny thing is their emissions weren’t that bad, several other European manufacturers were worse.
DocTomoe · 16h ago
In all fairness, in the general European perception, with the Cougar, the Puma, and the Focus, Ford is not really seen as an "American" brand. Especially the Focus has virtually nothing to do with what Europeans would consider 'an American car'. It is the quintessential low-to-mid-tier Eurocar: small, cheap, does what it is supposed to do.
Compare that to e.g. Chevrolet, which tried - and failed - to get a foothold in Europe. The failure was mostly them not understanding the local market.
pqtyw · 16h ago
> e.g. Chevrolet
Also it overlapped a lot with Opel which a much more successful brand in Europe. Basically it was an off-brand/cheap Opel, which wasn't exactly doing that great itself...
SoftTalker · 15h ago
Ford sold the Focus in the USA also, I had one and loved it. It was one of their few "world" cars.
darkwater · 16h ago
Didn't Chevrolet just bought and rebranded some Korean automaker?
pqtyw · 16h ago
AFAIK they were selling rebadged Daewoo models which were built on platforms developed by Opel. I suppose they wanted a budget brand and manufacturing and importing from Korea was cheaper back in those days than just using Opel's factories..
Gibbon1 · 14h ago
EV's and Hybrids get better mileage and pollute less.
It's funny how the Clinton admin forced a golden egg into GM's hands (the EV1) and GM tossed it away in disgust when Bush was elected.
wil421 · 17h ago
Diesel engines in the US have stricter regulations. I doubt folks in the EU will start buying PowerStrokes, Cummins, or Duramaxes anytime soon.
testing22321 · 15h ago
They are not stricter, just different.
US emissions standards don’t allow some things that euro6+ does, and visa versa.
There is an effort to make them overlap to make it easier to meet both standards.
FireBeyond · 17h ago
How so? There is no way any of those engines would pass emissions in the EU. How are US regulations even stricter?
pkaye · 16h ago
Back in 2015 US EPA NOx emission limits were tighter than EU regulations.
I feel this also has a lot to do with the use of diesel. The number of passenger vehicles and light duty pickups in the US that actually use diesel is a fraction of what it was in Europe.
The emission limits being for ULEV vehicles, I don't think I have seen a ULEV truck - indeed California classifies most under the LEV banner.
None of this is to change the point around nitrous oxide emissions - the environment doesn't care whether it came from a VW TDI or a F350, just the amount.
But it is also far far easier to implement such low emission standards in the US because we just don't really use diesel like that.
And when you get to the heavy duty pickups (F250, F350, etc.), then most of that goes out of the window.
rurban · 2h ago
The standard are similar but testing is different. In the US every new engine has to be tested, in the EU only the first R&D engines need to be tested on standard automated test cycles. All subsequent engines not. This makes cheating trivial and manifactoring cheap.
LunaSea · 17h ago
Germany is free to prove that these companies are cheating as well.
No comments yet
oblio · 16h ago
VW has just become the #1 EV seller in Europe.
thatguy0900 · 17h ago
We should let our executives commit crimes lest they be outcompeted by other executives committing worse crimes is a terrible argument. It's more a argument for not letting the other company compete as easily in your country
dguest · 15h ago
Not to mention that it assumes assumes lying, cheating, and corruption is just the price you pay for quality products.
Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
izacus · 13h ago
If our companies get destroyed, people fired and US/Chinese crooks win while EU spirals into recession, moral high ground is going to be a poor comfort.
mcv · 13h ago
Most blatant case was when the HSBC bank was found guilty of laundering billions for Mexican drug cartels. Any person found guilty of that, would have gone to prison for years, but nobody at HSBC went to prison, and the bank was fined mere millions for the crime of laundering billions. I'm sure that taught them a lesson.
So I'm glad finally seeing some repercussions for corporate crime.
WalterBright · 8h ago
Sam Bankster-Fraud is currently sitting in jail, and Madoff died in jail. Elizabeth Holmes is sitting in jail, too.
candiddevmike · 8h ago
They stole from rich and powerful people. Rick Scott was the CEO of a company that committed the largest Medicare fraud to date and never saw prison time.
EasyMark · 12h ago
Same in USA, tons of corps misappropriated funds that were meant to help keep employees hired. Almost no prosecutionsat all and the records the government kept were abysmal
constantcrying · 17h ago
>Start a company and steal billions from your customers and/or the tax payer, and you will probably get away with it.
In this case not only were the managers personally held liable, the company itself also had to pay vast amounts of compensation to customers. Not only in Germany or the EU, but also to US customers.
hulitu · 17h ago
> not only were the managers personally held liable
Yes but not all of them. The top one is still evading justice.
Aeolun · 14h ago
He’s not evading justice if he was never involved. That’s the whole point of having a 4 year trial, so you can figure out who was actually guilty.
DocTomoe · 16h ago
Good luck proving where the decision was made. Volkswagen's CEO is unlikely to have been asked whether to be 'creative' about testing setups.
FirmwareBurner · 18h ago
Because with large companies, blame and accountability gets spread thin over a wide area till it evaporates, so everyone gets away with it.
aeyes · 17h ago
Ultimately the CEO is responsible. To me it doesn't even matter if the CEO knows about it or not, if not the company has poor governance which is the CEOs full responsibility.
Wirecard CEO has been arrested since 2020, will probably sit for another 10 years.
bluGill · 16h ago
The question is should the CEO have know. A CEO that trys to set a culture of doing the right thing, with training on what the right thing is, and other such things can still be deceived by someone low level who cheats. It is possible for one person to cover their tracks for a long time if they are trying to cheat. It can be years to track down who is doing the immoral thing even after you catch something is wrong.
The question this is this one person (or small group) operating against their instructions, or is it the CEO encouraging people to cheat? That can be a hard question, but we want CEOs to think if I do "enough" (whatever that is) to ensure we obey the law I'm okay and thus I want to ensure enough is done. There are always crooks in the world, we want to ensure they are not encourged. If the CEO is always at fault their thought is likely to go to how can I ensure that tracks are covered so they nobody can be convicted.
jajko · 14h ago
Those golden parachutes and lavish lifestyle comes with a cost. That cost is responsibility and risks it brings.
Whether he knew or nit is a matter for courst, but in any case he is responsible too. Punish crooks harsh and visibly, reward honesty and good engineering massively and also visibly and company as a whole will act accordingly. We dont talk about a single guy hacking some firmware build, but a well known company culture.
No comments yet
rurban · 16h ago
Which CEO? Of the 4 big German manufacturers, which conspired do implement these special cheats, or Bosch which implemented this cheat, and supported it as such?
Or the politicians who wrote into law to able to use such a cheating device?
That would be 5 CEO's plus at least 2 german politicians, plus 20 more politicians in all other countries which selected this cheating EU standard.
rightbyte · 13h ago
Wanting to use velocity profiles to set exhaust treatment parameters during warm up of the engine is totally reasonable.
Bosh's software is tunable to silly extents to avoid expensive vehicle testing as testing is tied to binaries due to bad processes.
You can more or less make a different program by changing 'parameters'.
I really think it might be unfortunate if this would extend into a crusade versus general computing.
autobodie · 17h ago
That is extremely wreckless. The board is unquestionably the most responsible party.
DocTomoe · 16h ago
Wirecard CEO was proven beyond reasonable doubt that he personally was involved in large-scale fraud.
AnimalMuppet · 17h ago
I believe "knew or should have known" is the legal statement. Ignorance (either deliberate or accidental) doesn't get you off the hook.
nthingtohide · 17h ago
Rhodesia solution is magnificient in this case.
Sending A Letter To The PM | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats
But negligence is fundamentally different from mens rea. Fine to punish both but I am not a fan of justice intentionally ignoring context.
dragonwriter · 16h ago
> But negligence is fundamentally different from mens rea
It differs in that mens rea is the legal concept of a culpable state of mind, and negligence is one example. More fully, a crime is generally defined by a prohibited act (actua reus) and a wrongful state of mind (mens rea), though there are strict liability crimes with no mens rea required.
For, say, murder (in common law, specific statutory schemes may diverge from this somewhat), the actus reus is homicide, and the mens rea is “malice aforethought”.
While “malice aforethought” is sui generis and seen only in murder, the common kinds of mens rea used in defining crimes, in descending order of the severity with which they are usually treated, are intent, recklessness, and negligence. (The same mental states are relevant in tort liability, though strict liability in tort is more common, and the civil and criminal definitions of negligence, particularly, are somewhat different.)
potato3732842 · 16h ago
Not just companies, nonprofits, religions, governments
constantcrying · 17h ago
In this case both the company and the responsible managers were held liable. Of course a lot of blame shifting was attempted, but clearly it did not result in no one being held responsible.
fanwood · 18h ago
Not really, it's just that rich people are mostly above the law most of the time
anovikov · 17h ago
When it comes to criminal offences, they are pretty much within the law, well except they can afford better lawyers so usually get away with minimum legally possible punishment.
Companies and the concept of limited liability exists to make innovation possible. No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. And, because majority of money businessmen make is the stock worth, company being insolvent and thus it's stock losing all value is in itself a punishment heavy enough for the founders.
lucianbr · 17h ago
> No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails.
What does that have to do with anything? We're not discussing a case of VW making bad business decisions and losing money.
If you start a company and break the law and harm people, you should have your house confiscated and/or go to prison. If you can't take this responsibility, just don't start the startup, that's perfect.
You are creating confusion about the subject being discussed in order to defend criminals.
SoftTalker · 15h ago
Yes that was a bad example. The "limited liability" concept applies to financial losses, not crimes.
nemonemo · 17h ago
We need to balance the benefit and the downside of the limited liability in corporations. If innovation no longer becomes beneficial for the society and only beneficial for a small number of people, perhaps the society may need to reconsider the concept.
thatguy0900 · 17h ago
Why would you go to jail unless you're doing something illegal? Are you honestly saying startups should be legally exempt from pollution laws and allowed to cheat brazenly on commissions tests by public agencies? It's fair for rich people to just lose some income(and still be rich) for crimes while poor people have to go to jail is honestly a unhinged take
FirmwareBurner · 18h ago
Rich people are above the law precisely because they use corporations and corporate laws as shields to deflect personal liability of their actions as a actions of "the company" which is a faceless entity.
"You see, I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money, but that's actually on you because you didn't read the fine print I put in the contract you signed. And don't worry, justice was served, the company got punished and is now insolvent. Now watch this drive *swings golf club*"
lb1lf · 17h ago
“Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.”
Edward, Lord Thurlow c.1850
lurk2 · 16h ago
> I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money
This isn’t how it works.
const_cast · 13h ago
This is exactly how it works. Liability spread out over even just 10 people is so much less risky than one person.
A corporation can do pretty much anything. Steal, lie, poison communities, give people HIV. Anything.
lurk2 · 10h ago
> This is exactly how it works.
No, it isn’t. Limited liability does not shield executives from criminal prosecution. If an LLC defrauds another party, the perpetrators are both criminally and civilly liable; this is true in every common law country you can think of. Limited liability corporations enjoy a limitation of civil liability (i.e. the shareholders cannot be held liable for more than the company is worth). This limitation is not exhaustive in the case of fraud or criminal negligence. In practice it is of course possible that people “get away with” both, but that is a failing of law enforcement, not limited liability itself.
wat10000 · 17h ago
It’s worse than that. Rich-people crimes are often codified as much less severe than regular-people crimes, or are just outright legal.
This is a great example. Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Stab a person in the lungs, go to jail. Kill people by putting toxins into their lungs, well, just stay under this limit.
Walk out the door with a $10 item you didn’t pay for, crime. Fail to pay your worker $1,000 that they earned, that’s a civil matter. Worst case you’ll have to pay a penalty.
lkbm · 16h ago
> Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Polluting is not a "rich person" crime. It's very much something normal/poor people do a lot, too. It's common for individuals to burn leaves. It's less common, but also an active problem, for them to burn piles of trash (including plastic, tires, etc.)
As an individual, I'm allowed to do a certain amount of pollution (some because it's legal, some because it's unenforced), and will get fined if I do too much, same as the corporation.
wat10000 · 11h ago
As an individual, at least you can make the argument that your activities result in far less than one death. What’s the appropriate punishment for one micromort? I don’t know the answer to that but it’s probably not too much.
Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
_DeadFred_ · 17h ago
Someone floated on here that the punishment should be partial government ownership stakes instead of weak fines. It doesn't syphon off funds and risk damaging important national companies that are 'too big to punish'. Instead it dilutes shareholder value and DIRECTLY impacts the company owners. It also gives the government an inside place in the company which no company wants to deal with. If a company doesn't change ultimately the owners lose ownership.
lucianbr · 16h ago
Proof that solutions exist, if we want them. Whatever the cause of the apparent impunity of large corporations and rich people, it is not a lack of workable solutions. See also fines proportional to income, which now exist in multiple countries.
7952 · 16h ago
I wonder if you could require the company to licence all its IP for free within the country. So that the brand and designs could still exist.
Nasrudith · 15h ago
That sounds like a terrible idea because it would progressively "bribe" the government to be in their interest to take the company's side as they gain more and more of it. Combine it that conflicts of interest with the appearance of improprirety and another conflict of interest of making expropriation of the successful a temptation.
The latter could be even more disasterous long term. Nobody wants to go out to dinner with cannibals or show up at the stores for fear of being eaten. Likewise being known as an expropriating country, you may as well go ahead and embargo yourself.
DocTomoe · 16h ago
VW already is owned by the German state of NRW (20% of the voting rights, 11.8% of the equity)
rurban · 2h ago
VW is owned by the Porsche family. Audi also shortly owned it. Audi creates the engines for VW, because VW by itself can create nothing much by itself.
junga · 15h ago
Not exactly. Volkswagen headquarters are located in Wolfsburg which belongs to the German state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). NRW, or officially abbreviated NW, is the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen).
Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.
tsoukase · 14h ago
Auto industry is the material God of Germany. Similar to SW companies in the US. These people have immunity solely because they support the system.
Do you think the US would extradit top level FAANG people if they indirectly harmed some foreign country? No way!
lo_zamoyski · 12h ago
> the 2008 banking disaster
We would do well to overhaul the banking system by categorically eliminating usury and much speculative nonsense. It is incredible the amount of rationalization that goes into propping up these morally indefensible practices. Criminalizing them will go a long way to eliminate many legitimized patterns of economic exploitation.
MPSFounder · 16h ago
At least something came out of it. In 08, all the executives that tanked our economy retired and are enjoying manors in the Hampton and socialize in country clubs on Long Island. Cheney, an oil executive, started a war based on lies when he landed in the highest office of the land, and now owns hundreds of acres in Wyoming based on oil profits Halliburton extracted (and paid him as a consultant for 5years after his VP position, whatever that means). I wish we did a better job in the US sending our criminals to prison, but I guess a neoliberal capitalist society will always favor a) high fines over justice for white collar crimes, b) as little attention as possible, given a supposedly free media can make a raucous encore and draw more attention. It is a facet of the trade.
arthurcolle · 17h ago
They jailed 1 banker lol
MrDresden · 15h ago
> They jailed 1 banker lol
You've been incorrectly informed.
As reported back in 2018[0], 36 individuals had already received a cumulative jail sentence of 96 years, with still more cases ongoing when this report was written.
Thanks for the correction. I incorrectly recalled from that documentary "Inside Job"
No comments yet
kunzhi · 17h ago
Well, as everyone knows, accountability really stifles innovation. All my libertarian friends tell me that it’d be better to privatize it rather than trying to legislate morality.
bombcar · 17h ago
Luigi as privatized accountability?
jxjnskkzxxhx · 17h ago
If powerful people were afraid they would be a lot less unhinged.
blippage · 1h ago
As Bill Burr said, if we were to eat just one billionaire, then all the rest would tow the line.
philwelch · 17h ago
This isn’t how human psychology works at all.
const_cast · 13h ago
I mean, in the past we used to just hang or bomb rich people that got too close to the sun.
People like Carnegie built 1500 public libraries because he knew the game. He knew that his position as part of the ultra-wealthy made him a target, and he had to toe a line. He need to maximize exploitation but not too much, so as to not cause a stir. He did a pretty good job. Some people didn't do such a good job - we don't hear about them because they and their families were murdered.
Rich people today are much safer, mostly due to people being better people and technology.
SpicyLemonZest · 12h ago
I don't think that's accurate at all. It's true that rich people in Carnegie's day had more concern about organized violence against them, but most of them preferred to deal with it by getting the Pinkertons or the military to stop you from organizing anything against them. Late 1800s labor disputes killed a lot more workers than millionaires.
philwelch · 11h ago
Gilded Age industrialists in America weren’t murdered by angry mobs, that’s just a sick terroristic left wing fantasy.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 15h ago
Wanna share with us what makes you qualified to make such definitive statements on human psychology?
philwelch · 13h ago
You don’t have to be an expert to know that fear and panic don’t make people hinged, they make them even more unhinged.
In particular, terroristic violence almost always incites spiteful reaction against the perpetrators and anyone associated with them.
mg794613 · 16h ago
This isn’t how _normal_ human psychology works at all.
We're talking about sociopaths, not people like you and me.
How much of a percentage that is on that level, we can guess.
weard_beard · 17h ago
It’s true. The only check on most corporate fraud is an engineer with an Annecdote of real consequences.
GuB-42 · 13h ago
And I think there is a good reason for that. When a company steals billions from customers, the entire company is responsible, and the entire company profits from the crime. So why single out a few executives? Everyone shall be punished: the CEO of course, but also every employee, every shareholder. You have a single VW stock, you are responsible too.
So, how do you punish everyone fairly? By fining the company for a large amount of money. Shareholders lose their value, employees don't get their raise, and execs won't get their bonus, there is a good chance they get fired too. Companies are for profit, it is even more true for public companies, for which profit is their duty to their shareholders. So hit where it hurts, that is profits.
As for jailing CEOs, what will it bring? Don't forget that a CEO is just an employee, hired by the directors to maximize profits for the shareholders. If the entire company is corrupt, everyone will be more than happy to hire scapegoat CEOs if it can serve their interests. Jailing them will solve nothing, it may even be counter productive as those who are most likely to get that job are people who are ready to risk prison to win big, a crime lord profile.
There are still reasons to jail the CEO, but only if he personally deceived the rest of the company and shareholders, but that is effectively the same as stealing from the company.
Neywiny · 13h ago
My issue with your comment is that you're taking the humanity out of it. A person or group of people decided to commit crimes. Go to jail. If a group of people hired a scapegoat, that group still would've conspired to commit crimes. That's a punishable offense. Punish them. You can punish a board of directors. You can persecute a C-suite. They're all humans. That's the way justice is. Nobody is above the law.
itsanaccount · 12h ago
Corporate death penalty. I want to see these groups of "shareholder value" get destroyed. Equal to a damage of a normal death penalty to an individual. Spread the organization to the winds.
If that means a "company" becomes smaller, with more isolated crews run by their own leadership, good.
Neywiny · 12h ago
I could see there being an issue with too much forced collusion if companies are too small to operate. Like how a lot of companies put all the blame on a profitless, employee-less "subsidiary" and say "oh no, we can't pay a fine, we have no money. We gave all our profits to Company Inc Ltd, we're just Company Inc." We'd need to fix that first. Then corporate death penalty. Which I believe does exist but isn't used very often. I think some court rulings have forbidden operations in certain states.
anigbrowl · 12h ago
No. Decision making authority is concentrated in executives and managers, and likewise so should the lgal responsibility be. Spreading it evenly across the whole entity such that the janitor is punished in the same proportion as the individuals who decide to commit fraud is nonsensical. shareholders should certainly take a hit, but consequences should be administered in proportion to the degree of authority exercised in the commission of the crime.
pqtyw · 13h ago
> So, how do you punish everyone fairly?
By punishing those who decided to commit the crime? Indirectly benefiting from somebody's else illegal actions is not a crime (you might be required to pay it back but that's it..).
Generally executives are the ones who benefit the most of these case and then leave the rest of of the company and the shareholders on the hook while they move on or retire.
> and execs won't get their bonus,
What if they already have their bonuses? Generally it might take years for any investigation to conclude, often executives who benefited from it couldn't care less what happens to the company they don't work at anymore anyway.
7bit · 2h ago
We should also include neighbours of the CEO and the employees as they have also just watched as their neighbours committed these crimes. As well as the bus driver who enabled them to commit these crimes in the first place by driving the to the crime scene!
hollerith · 17h ago
The OP does not mention the name of one VW exec (Oliver Schmidt, the head of VW's environmental and engineering office in Michigan, a German citizen) convicted in US Federal Court in 2017 for his part in the scandal. He was released after serving about 3.5 years in prison.
A second exec sentenced in the US (also in 2017) was James Liang, also a German citizen, who prosecutors say "was a pivotal figure in designing the systems used to make Volkswagen diesels appear to comply with U.S. pollution standards, when instead they could emit up to 40 times the allowed levels of smog-forming compounds in normal driving." He cooperated with prosecutors and was released from prison in 2019.
I vaguely remember that the top execs were charged by US (Federal) prosecutors (in 2017) but the German government refused to extradict. Schmidt was arrested and tried only because he made the mistake of traveling to the US after the scandal came to light (although of course the German Court might have gotten around to trying him like they tried the execs in this current news story).
jillesvangurp · 17h ago
Deutsche Welle has a bit more detail and also discusses the CEO:
Apparently he has some health issues which caused the case against him to be suspended. That might resume later but unclear right now. He's 78 at this point.
bhelkey · 15h ago
The VX emission cheating scandal came to light a decade ago in 2015. If a 78 year old is too old to prosecute, Germany should have prosecuted him a decade ago when he was 68.
Instead, Germany refused to extradite him to the US to stand trial in 2017 [1].
Many countries do not legally permit the extradition of their own citizens. In Germany, extradition is generally only allowed to other EU countries, which meant the German government’s options were quite limited.
throwaway81523 · 16h ago
This article is better though nothing I've seen names the executives (different media law maybe).
"A former head of diesel engine development was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The former head of drive electronics received two years and seven months in prison.
The highest-ranking defendant, a former member of the Volkswagen brand's development board, received one year and three months' probation. A former department head was sentenced to one year and ten months' probation."
Doesn't sound like it got near the C suite.
constantcrying · 13h ago
>Doesn't sound like it got near the C suite.
Your quote shows that it was the CTO who got the suspended sentence and the trial for the CEO is pending. The head of the board was indicted as well, but not convicted.
Tomte · 17h ago
And one engineer went on vacation to America. Congratulations, you‘ve won seven years in a foreign prison!
"Conspiracy to defraud the United States" is a more dignified charge to get in an airport bathroom than what happens when you have a "wide stance" as a Senator.
keeganpoppen · 15h ago
that wikipedia article is atrociously written holy cow. "pawn sacrifice"?!?
fch42 · 14h ago
"Bauernopfer" (German for "pawn sacrifice") is a common term in German to mean "sacrificing someone insignificant to get the big guy out of trouble".
So the English translation might be machine-done; in the original German, the word makes a lot of sense and carries a definite meaning.
mschuster91 · 17h ago
It's the other way around, he was US-based and went for a vacation to Germany.
Tomte · 17h ago
He used to work in the US, but at the time of the US prosecution and his arrest he was back in Wolfsburg, and the vacation was in Florida.
The English Wikipedia article isn‘t terribly clear about that.
No comments yet
bhelkey · 15h ago
Do you have a source for this?
CNN reports that he was on vacation to Florida and was arrested in the airport awaiting a flight home to Germany [1].
He is a German national though. Bit of a confusing situation.
Drunk_Engineer · 16h ago
The headline says "execs" but I don't see any Board members getting prison terms. Martin Winterkorn, the CEO, has basically escaped prosecution altogether.
teruakohatu · 16h ago
It would be unlikely (not impossible) that board members would be briefed about ongoing criminal behaviour, and certainly not something so deep into operations as how the ECU is being programmed.
Can a board member be reasonably responsible for the actions of tens of thousands of employees if they have not explicitly enabled or condoned criminal behaviour?
The person that would benefit the most would be a senior executive who stands to gain a promotion, bonus or land an even better job elsewhere.
A former prime minister of my country was fined over $6 million for being on the board of a company what traded while insolvent. Not a prison sentence but a harsh penalty for someone that was not super rich (as far as I am aware).
triceratops · 15h ago
They should at least be barred from being board members for a certain period of time.
s1artibartfast · 4h ago
Why, if they did nothing wrong and had no knowledge of anything illegal?
It is extremely rare to see that kind of prosecution in western countries (US or EU).
Doxin · 2h ago
Because they should have known. They should have made it their business to know. Looking the other way on purpose should not be a valid legal defense.
bhelkey · 15h ago
The US indicted seven senior executives including Martin Winterkorn in 2017 [1]. None of these seven were extradited from Germany to the US to face trial.
You are repeating it here as if it was legal for Germany to extradite Germans to USA
constantcrying · 13h ago
>but I don't see any Board members getting prison terms.
The head of development, a board member, got a suspended sentence.
>Martin Winterkorn, the CEO, has basically escaped prosecution altogether.
How so?
Drunk_Engineer · 10h ago
Suspended sentence…not prison.
Winterkorn has spent the past decade getting various postponements in his trial. Now that he is approaching 80 it is unlikely he will suffer any serious punishment.
sensanaty · 1h ago
Wow only took them a decade, and not even all the execs involved have been punished. Plus the terms are pitiful, 4.5 years max in cozy German jails.
This should've happened a long time ago, and we should've made an example out of every single one of these scam artists. If it were up to me all these scumbags would be made destitute and barred from ever being anywhere near managing anything bigger than a mop.
Animats · 15h ago
The head of Diesel engine development and the head of powertrain electronics are going to jail. Two CEOs and the chairman got off.
godelski · 15h ago
This is good to see. Often we see the scandal unfold but hear very little about the followups. They're long, drawn out, and incredibly boring. But at the end, there's something very valuable.
Without these followups the public feel like they just get away, and in some cases they do. I'd argue that without seeing the punishment we are encouraging these crimes.
I'd much rather read this kind of news than whatever filler bullshit is on the front page of the news now.
While CrowdStrike was incompetent, this is remotely not the same thing as what VW did. What CrowdStrike did should be best punished by the market and in court by companies who were their customers.
diego_sandoval · 14h ago
Crowdstrike stock price seems to be close to an all time high.
jeroenhd · 13h ago
There are two or three companies that do what CrowdStrike does on a scale CrowdStrike supports. Not necessarily on a technical level, but on a CEO-goes-to-the-same-golf-clubs level of business support. CrowdStrike was probably the worst of the bunch, but any of them can cause the problems CrowdStrike caused.
It'll happen again, though probably on a smaller scale. Software like CrowdStrike's is a massive single point of failure but spending twice the money to have a backup suite on part of the network to maintain basic operations when the primary suite crashes is not very popular. The short hit to productivity is worth the emergency prep in terms of financial output, and the people spending weeks on end recovering systems are expendable anyway.
an0malous · 11h ago
“Competition is for losers”
paulddraper · 16h ago
Sure, if they broke any laws.
saravanan2661 · 16h ago
Where can one find these "defeat devices"? (asking for educational purposes)
k4rli · 15h ago
IIRC it was just the firmware in Bosch ECUs.
constantcrying · 13h ago
The ECUs, the computer controlling the engine was programmed in a way in which it could detect the conditions of a test being run and alter it's behavior.
WrongOnInternet · 15h ago
> The court sentenced two of the former executives to prison for several years...
Anyone here know German? I couldn't find a good translation for the number "several."
detaro · 15h ago
(I assume you ask about the exact numbers, not how to translate it?)
The actual prison sentences are 4.5 years for the former head of diesel engine development, 2 years 7 months for the former head of engine electronics.
Two more got sentenced on probation, a former (guessing at the translation here) Chief R&D Officer for 1 year 3 months, a (unspecified in the source I'm reading) department head 1 year 10 months.
Apparently 31 more people are targeted by further cases. (+ Winterkorn, but I wouldn't be surprised if he never makes it to trial given it's been aborted twice already due to health issues)
WrongOnInternet · 14h ago
Yes, thanks for doing the journalism that the author of the story could not be bothered to do.
blippage · 2h ago
Brit here. IANAL, but there is a legal principle of "vicarious liability". So if an employee does something bad, it's the employer that foots the bill. This is vicarious liability. It is actually a "good" thing as a legal principle because it's the the employer who has all the dough and is most able to compensate for a wrong.
The downside to all this is that the bad actors get away with it. They have less skin in the game.
My view is that more people need to go to jail. Corporations would behave less like sociopathic institutions if this were done.
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> Brit here. IANAL, but there is a legal principle of "vicarious liability". So if an employee does something bad, it's the employer that foots the bill. This is vicarious liability.
More specifically (vicarious liability is correct, but less specific) it is respondear superior, the liability of the principal for harmful actions of the agent within the scope of the principal-agent relationship.
FirmwareBurner · 18h ago
I see this as an absolute win. Personal liability is the way to keep corporations accountable.
As long as breaking the law only results with a fine the company has to pay, then the issue is an accounting problem for the executives, but the moment they risk going to jail, then it becomes a legal problem for them so they actually address it.
PaulKeeble · 16h ago
Two engineers that I know of got the following:
James Liang got 40 months
Schmidt was sentenced to 84 months
Then the executives
Jens Hadler four and a half years in prison
Hanno Jelden two years and seven months
Prosecutors are still investigating and trying to shake out more. This appears to be a wide conspiracy within VW.
B1FF_PSUVM · 15h ago
FINALLY!
It's the least they could do for the reputation of German engineering.
[ if (CAUGHT): toss an MBA on the barbie ]
DrNosferatu · 13h ago
#irony
You mean it wasn’t the doing of the Southern European engineers at Volkswagen?
#irony
bfrog · 7h ago
Now do Boeing so the message is clear. US DoJ cutting deals and ending the criminal prosecution is just so unbelievably typical.
beefnugs · 6h ago
Still time to pay the dump tax, then open a real factory in the USA where you can cheat other countries' rules
Mistletoe · 17h ago
We would see some world change finally if this became the norm. Breaking the law in a corporate suit shouldn't be any different than breaking the law as a soldier or citizen. Corporations have been doing war crimes on us for quite some time now.
amadeuspagel · 16h ago
This is the norm.
jacknews · 17h ago
What about major shareholders?
Presumably they were blissfully unaware, and were simply pleased when VW delivered more profits, as demanded.
triceratops · 15h ago
That's what the "limited" in "limited company" means. Blame the board members and executive management, sure. But it's hard to go beyond that.
constantcrying · 13h ago
>Presumably they were blissfully unaware, and were simply pleased when VW delivered more profits, as demanded.
It is kind of ridiculous to believe that either the government of lower Saxony or the UAE or the Porsche Piech family were aware of this.
transcriptase · 17h ago
And?
_DeadFred_ · 16h ago
Instead of fines the government should be granted an ownership percentage in companies that break that law (thus diluting ownership and directly impacting owners). That way the punishment impacts shareholders/owners, but in way that keeps corporate protections so that society can continue to function.
jeffrallen · 15h ago
And for egregious behavior like Chevron in Ecuador, the government should cut up and sell the company in a million useless pieces completely destroying all shareholder value.
I wish someone would give me a chance to vote to repeal the personal death penalty and create the corporate death penalty.
SpicyLemonZest · 11h ago
The Chevron Ecuador story is a great example of how impossible discussions on corporate misconduct can get. Chevron has successfully argued in both the US and an international tribunal that the Ecuadorian judgment was procured through corruption and bribery. But oil companies are very unpopular, so many people who encounter the case assume that Chevron must have been in the wrong, and the lawyer who was disbarred and jailed for his role in that corruption must be right.
It seems that at the very least manslaughter is legal in the US now, provided you pay $1.28M per victim.
gjvc · 17h ago
Next, bring back hanging for corporate manslaughter.
hardlianotion · 17h ago
Nice.
MortyWaves · 17h ago
The last time I read any updates on this, everyone on both sides of the legal process were trying to single out scapegoat individual software engineers and rake them over the coals. Did something change?
johnklos · 16h ago
I don't think software engineers were independently looking at emissions data and unilaterally decided to "fix" the emissions shortcomings in software. I think they were told by others to do that. It's good that Germany is going after the people who decided that fraud was the answer.
bhelkey · 15h ago
> It's good that Germany is going after the people who decided that fraud
When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial [1].
The VW scandal was made public in 2015 [2] and involved cheating since 2009. Sentencing only two executives to jail a decade after their wrong doing made international news does not send a strong message.
Germany does not extradite its nationals to the US at all. They can sometimes extradite to other EU states, but not to USA.
Sending own citizens to foreign country is generally big deal and not something that is done.
bhelkey · 16h ago
When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives [1]. Germany did not cooperate. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial.
One more mid level engineer involved in the scandal made the mistake of taking a vacation to Florida. He was arrested in the airport awaiting his flight home to Germany [2]. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison but was let out after serving half of that sentence [3].
Germany does not extradite its nationals to the US at all. Not sure why would you expect this case to be so special that Germany would break its own laws.
wildrice · 18h ago
I always thought there was a tremendous irony in Germany’s far left heavily protesting Tesla for Elon’s speech while their own corporate giant committed widespread emissions fraud for years
Flemlo · 17h ago
These are two issues independent of each other.
One argument doesn't make the other in any way worse or better
I'm a German, I was not aware that VW was doing this until it came out and it was a huge blow out.
Do you think people just test their cars fume output?! You do understand that the software was build to detect being on a test stand right?
Who reverse engineers software like this...
johannes1234321 · 17h ago
The Scandal was big in Germany and contrary to complaints about Musk there was quite a lot legal action against VW (while law has some restrictions preventing huge damage claims as in the US) so I don't really understand the comparison.
bantunes · 17h ago
Why is this irony? One is being done out in the open and the other was unknown for years, so unless "the far left" knew about the defeat devices, this is a false dichotomy.
moooo99 · 17h ago
Its a false dichotomy either way because VW and the handling of the administration back then was heavily criticized by many parties, including left leaning parties like the greens
JHer · 17h ago
I don't understand. It's not like the far left is Volkswagen's fan club?
rat87 · 13h ago
Elon campaigned for the German far right party which basically everyone including Germans conservative party regards as fascist. It's not a far left thing to oppose that
croes · 17h ago
There were multiple protests in 2016.
They protest every time a company fucks up like that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drumm
It took 10 yrs to convict them mind you, and as I understand it they’re all out now.
窃(Steal)国(country)者(people)侯(gets to be the king)
Yes, it is a Chinese idiom.
Similar to Paul Getty's quote, "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
But in this case, it cuts much deeper and darker.
The others are about getting away with something by just making the crime big enough that it's evaluated and handled in a totally different arena.
The bank can still destroy the rest of your life, so you didn't get away with anything (setting aside bankrupcy and how you can actually usually start over, and that may or may not be all that terrible for you).
The banking one is just saying that the bank can not get 100 million from you no matter what they do, because it simply doesn't exist. In that case, everyone still agrees you still owe it and they are entitled to it. You didn't gain anything by going big enough. And it's not really true that it's the banks problem instead of yours. The bank has a problem, but you still also have a problem.
If you owe the bank enough money, you have the power in the relationship in most cases.
If you have any assets, the bank can take them from you.
The thing about renegotiating a loan is you don't have enough assets, but if the bank takes what you do have, you will never be able to repay the loan. I.e. the bank stands to recover more if you are successful than if you are bankrupt.
If you have any assets in the less than a billion dollars range, if you have assets over a billion dollars (which if you have enough of a loan in today's money to match the 100 million quote, you probably have over a billion in assets) then the bank knows its looking at a real fight. Nobody likes a real fight.
People like fights they're guaranteed to win quickly.
A. Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XI, 18, 18.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Gellius/1...
“I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”
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It's amazing how badly customers are willing to be treated but at the same time, you're not obliged to buy a service so I can't really rant too much.
Edit : Found the quote and unironically it's credited as an American Proverb.
> If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb.
https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-retailers-cite-rising-theft-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
Actually it turns out fraud and white collar crime takes more out of the American economy.
EDIT: I'm going to cast more suspicion on the FBI graph. According to a 2022 report[0], the number of robbery offenses reported in 2018 was 1691 cases. The median loss being about $2k. Doing some caveman-math, that's about $3B lost to robbery in 2018. Unless we went through some insane spike of lawlessness between 2012 and 2018, I don't see how $340m in 2012 jumps to $3B in 2018.
[0]: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
Why not compare recovered to recovered, which are pretty close to each other? https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...
That business appears to steal as much from their workers as criminal theft rings surely is kind of a big deal (based on the matching ACTUAL recovery numbers).
That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and the reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.
If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!
Should we not care about them as they are such a small part of gdp?
Wage theft is about $20b a year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
Comparing wages with GDP in this context doesn't prove anything.
https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...
But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.
But at least he's there for a bit
VW has international sales, and OP's implication might've been that Germany has a national interest in VW being competitive.
Well yes, I of course meant the entire EU+UK market. Regardless besides US and a handful of other countries VW is hardly competing that much with any American car companies anywhere (besides Tesla).
American car makers are still struggling a lot more in relative market share terms (GM+Ford+Tesla barely had over 33% in 2024 in the US). While VW alone had 26% in EU/UK/EFTA (just German companies have 39% of the entire market there)
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgkell/2022/12/05/from-emiss...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a2c7ca01-461c-4dc2-8006-ec1d6b61a...
Yeah, they're actually not doing well at all right now.
And the politicians which sanctioned these special diesel tests were not even named. Nor all the other countries who also choose the European Standard (not testing diesel engines) over the US Standard.
As early as the late 90's tuners offered features where doing something with the cruise control buttonss which would switch the engine computer back to stock programming to pass emissions, run on cheaper gas, or fool the dealer if it went in for service. How does everyone think they were able to do stuff like that without any hardware mods?
Oh, and all the car companies were self-reporting their CO2 emissions in the EU for decades. When EU regulators actually got around to testing cars, shockigly, the companies were lying.
It's basically accepted at this point that Telsa lies about their range and efficiency numbers, and recently there's evidence they have been fucking with people's odometers for the purpose of getting them out of warranty quicker.
Ferrari have all sorts of terms and prohibitions on things journalists can't do with their cars - one being track lap time testing. Why? Because they got caught by Top Gear specially modifying their cars for the Top Gear test circuit, as well as using tires that aren't on the production vehicles - and when Top Gear called them out, Ferrari permanently banned them *and have gone so far as to prohibit Ferrari owners from allowing Top Gear staff access to the owner's vehicles for testing, under threat of being blacklisted. Now that they've been caught cheating, they simply won't allow anyone to test their cars versus anyone else's.
The wheel keeps on turning.
They can buy a brand new truck sans engine and drop some terribly polluting piece of crap from several decades ago and bypass all modern emissions regulations.
Otherwise good point.
Just look at the hole the US has dug for itself when it stopped producing civilian sea-ships, nowadays the cost of producing or even repairing its war-oriented sea-ships is way too high. And not only that, but it doesn't have the people with the knowhow to build those ships anymore, no matter the money thrown at the problem.
Western Europe has certainly lost the capability of making even artillery shells at scale, let alone tank tracks, just look where we're at it now.
> as military technology typically comes first before any civilian application.
Diesel himself wasn't involved in any military thing, as far as I know, so I think you're wrong on that one.
The thing is that without a strong civilian industrial base focused on things adjacent to warfare (like the steel industry when it comes to building ships or artillery shells) any big power is going to come very short-handed in the next big war (assuming the war doesn't get nuclear, which is another discussion). So, if your country can't make diesel engines at scale, for whatever reason, then you can say goodbye to your logistics lines because you need lots and lots of trucks for said logistics as part of a continental war, i.e. forget the tanks.
Must be due to the lack of demand for civilian artillery shells, right?
Mercedes don't have an easy filter, but they do have some cars available with diesel engines, e.g. C-Class.
Diesel is now down to 9.5% of new cars sold in Europe (Q1 2025), less than full EVs ([2]).
[1] https://www.bmw.co.uk/en/all-models.html
[2] https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...
It does seem like diesel is trending lower, but it's not gone yet, regardless whether you think that is a good thing or not.
In any case, my point was this:
> it would be impossible to create diesel engines which would comply with enviromental standards
is false. Which it is.
Or multiple car manufacturers are still cheating, I guess we must consider the possibility.
Compare that to e.g. Chevrolet, which tried - and failed - to get a foothold in Europe. The failure was mostly them not understanding the local market.
Also it overlapped a lot with Opel which a much more successful brand in Europe. Basically it was an off-brand/cheap Opel, which wasn't exactly doing that great itself...
It's funny how the Clinton admin forced a golden egg into GM's hands (the EV1) and GM tossed it away in disgust when Bush was elected.
US emissions standards don’t allow some things that euro6+ does, and visa versa.
There is an effort to make them overlap to make it easier to meet both standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#U...
The emission limits being for ULEV vehicles, I don't think I have seen a ULEV truck - indeed California classifies most under the LEV banner.
None of this is to change the point around nitrous oxide emissions - the environment doesn't care whether it came from a VW TDI or a F350, just the amount.
But it is also far far easier to implement such low emission standards in the US because we just don't really use diesel like that.
And when you get to the heavy duty pickups (F250, F350, etc.), then most of that goes out of the window.
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Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
So I'm glad finally seeing some repercussions for corporate crime.
In this case not only were the managers personally held liable, the company itself also had to pay vast amounts of compensation to customers. Not only in Germany or the EU, but also to US customers.
Yes but not all of them. The top one is still evading justice.
Wirecard CEO has been arrested since 2020, will probably sit for another 10 years.
The question this is this one person (or small group) operating against their instructions, or is it the CEO encouraging people to cheat? That can be a hard question, but we want CEOs to think if I do "enough" (whatever that is) to ensure we obey the law I'm okay and thus I want to ensure enough is done. There are always crooks in the world, we want to ensure they are not encourged. If the CEO is always at fault their thought is likely to go to how can I ensure that tracks are covered so they nobody can be convicted.
Whether he knew or nit is a matter for courst, but in any case he is responsible too. Punish crooks harsh and visibly, reward honesty and good engineering massively and also visibly and company as a whole will act accordingly. We dont talk about a single guy hacking some firmware build, but a well known company culture.
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Or the politicians who wrote into law to able to use such a cheating device?
That would be 5 CEO's plus at least 2 german politicians, plus 20 more politicians in all other countries which selected this cheating EU standard.
Bosh's software is tunable to silly extents to avoid expensive vehicle testing as testing is tied to binaries due to bad processes.
You can more or less make a different program by changing 'parameters'.
I really think it might be unfortunate if this would extend into a crusade versus general computing.
Sending A Letter To The PM | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6lpKkcFQY
It differs in that mens rea is the legal concept of a culpable state of mind, and negligence is one example. More fully, a crime is generally defined by a prohibited act (actua reus) and a wrongful state of mind (mens rea), though there are strict liability crimes with no mens rea required.
For, say, murder (in common law, specific statutory schemes may diverge from this somewhat), the actus reus is homicide, and the mens rea is “malice aforethought”.
While “malice aforethought” is sui generis and seen only in murder, the common kinds of mens rea used in defining crimes, in descending order of the severity with which they are usually treated, are intent, recklessness, and negligence. (The same mental states are relevant in tort liability, though strict liability in tort is more common, and the civil and criminal definitions of negligence, particularly, are somewhat different.)
Companies and the concept of limited liability exists to make innovation possible. No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. And, because majority of money businessmen make is the stock worth, company being insolvent and thus it's stock losing all value is in itself a punishment heavy enough for the founders.
What does that have to do with anything? We're not discussing a case of VW making bad business decisions and losing money.
If you start a company and break the law and harm people, you should have your house confiscated and/or go to prison. If you can't take this responsibility, just don't start the startup, that's perfect.
You are creating confusion about the subject being discussed in order to defend criminals.
"You see, I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money, but that's actually on you because you didn't read the fine print I put in the contract you signed. And don't worry, justice was served, the company got punished and is now insolvent. Now watch this drive *swings golf club*"
Edward, Lord Thurlow c.1850
This isn’t how it works.
A corporation can do pretty much anything. Steal, lie, poison communities, give people HIV. Anything.
No, it isn’t. Limited liability does not shield executives from criminal prosecution. If an LLC defrauds another party, the perpetrators are both criminally and civilly liable; this is true in every common law country you can think of. Limited liability corporations enjoy a limitation of civil liability (i.e. the shareholders cannot be held liable for more than the company is worth). This limitation is not exhaustive in the case of fraud or criminal negligence. In practice it is of course possible that people “get away with” both, but that is a failing of law enforcement, not limited liability itself.
This is a great example. Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Stab a person in the lungs, go to jail. Kill people by putting toxins into their lungs, well, just stay under this limit.
Walk out the door with a $10 item you didn’t pay for, crime. Fail to pay your worker $1,000 that they earned, that’s a civil matter. Worst case you’ll have to pay a penalty.
Polluting is not a "rich person" crime. It's very much something normal/poor people do a lot, too. It's common for individuals to burn leaves. It's less common, but also an active problem, for them to burn piles of trash (including plastic, tires, etc.)
As an individual, I'm allowed to do a certain amount of pollution (some because it's legal, some because it's unenforced), and will get fined if I do too much, same as the corporation.
Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
The latter could be even more disasterous long term. Nobody wants to go out to dinner with cannibals or show up at the stores for fear of being eaten. Likewise being known as an expropriating country, you may as well go ahead and embargo yourself.
Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.
Do you think the US would extradit top level FAANG people if they indirectly harmed some foreign country? No way!
We would do well to overhaul the banking system by categorically eliminating usury and much speculative nonsense. It is incredible the amount of rationalization that goes into propping up these morally indefensible practices. Criminalizing them will go a long way to eliminate many legitimized patterns of economic exploitation.
You've been incorrectly informed.
As reported back in 2018[0], 36 individuals had already received a cumulative jail sentence of 96 years, with still more cases ongoing when this report was written.
[0]: https://www.visir.is/g/20181632401d/36-manns-i-samtals-96-ar...
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People like Carnegie built 1500 public libraries because he knew the game. He knew that his position as part of the ultra-wealthy made him a target, and he had to toe a line. He need to maximize exploitation but not too much, so as to not cause a stir. He did a pretty good job. Some people didn't do such a good job - we don't hear about them because they and their families were murdered.
Rich people today are much safer, mostly due to people being better people and technology.
In particular, terroristic violence almost always incites spiteful reaction against the perpetrators and anyone associated with them.
We're talking about sociopaths, not people like you and me.
How much of a percentage that is on that level, we can guess.
So, how do you punish everyone fairly? By fining the company for a large amount of money. Shareholders lose their value, employees don't get their raise, and execs won't get their bonus, there is a good chance they get fired too. Companies are for profit, it is even more true for public companies, for which profit is their duty to their shareholders. So hit where it hurts, that is profits.
As for jailing CEOs, what will it bring? Don't forget that a CEO is just an employee, hired by the directors to maximize profits for the shareholders. If the entire company is corrupt, everyone will be more than happy to hire scapegoat CEOs if it can serve their interests. Jailing them will solve nothing, it may even be counter productive as those who are most likely to get that job are people who are ready to risk prison to win big, a crime lord profile.
There are still reasons to jail the CEO, but only if he personally deceived the rest of the company and shareholders, but that is effectively the same as stealing from the company.
If that means a "company" becomes smaller, with more isolated crews run by their own leadership, good.
By punishing those who decided to commit the crime? Indirectly benefiting from somebody's else illegal actions is not a crime (you might be required to pay it back but that's it..).
Generally executives are the ones who benefit the most of these case and then leave the rest of of the company and the shareholders on the hook while they move on or retire.
> and execs won't get their bonus,
What if they already have their bonuses? Generally it might take years for any investigation to conclude, often executives who benefited from it couldn't care less what happens to the company they don't work at anymore anyway.
A second exec sentenced in the US (also in 2017) was James Liang, also a German citizen, who prosecutors say "was a pivotal figure in designing the systems used to make Volkswagen diesels appear to comply with U.S. pollution standards, when instead they could emit up to 40 times the allowed levels of smog-forming compounds in normal driving." He cooperated with prosecutors and was released from prison in 2019.
I vaguely remember that the top execs were charged by US (Federal) prosecutors (in 2017) but the German government refused to extradict. Schmidt was arrested and tried only because he made the mistake of traveling to the US after the scandal came to light (although of course the German Court might have gotten around to trying him like they tried the execs in this current news story).
https://www.dw.com/en/4-ex-vw-managers-guilty-of-fraud-over-...
Apparently he has some health issues which caused the case against him to be suspended. That might resume later but unclear right now. He's 78 at this point.
Instead, Germany refused to extradite him to the US to stand trial in 2017 [1].
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
https://www.dw.com/en/4-ex-vw-managers-guilty-of-fraud-over-...
"A former head of diesel engine development was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The former head of drive electronics received two years and seven months in prison.
The highest-ranking defendant, a former member of the Volkswagen brand's development board, received one year and three months' probation. A former department head was sentenced to one year and ten months' probation."
Doesn't sound like it got near the C suite.
Your quote shows that it was the CTO who got the suspended sentence and the trial for the CEO is pending. The head of the board was indicted as well, but not convicted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Schmidt_(engineer)
So the English translation might be machine-done; in the original German, the word makes a lot of sense and carries a definite meaning.
The English Wikipedia article isn‘t terribly clear about that.
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CNN reports that he was on vacation to Florida and was arrested in the airport awaiting a flight home to Germany [1].
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/17/news/companies/volkswagen-e...
Can a board member be reasonably responsible for the actions of tens of thousands of employees if they have not explicitly enabled or condoned criminal behaviour?
The person that would benefit the most would be a senior executive who stands to gain a promotion, bonus or land an even better job elsewhere.
A former prime minister of my country was fined over $6 million for being on the board of a company what traded while insolvent. Not a prison sentence but a harsh penalty for someone that was not super rich (as far as I am aware).
It is extremely rare to see that kind of prosecution in western countries (US or EU).
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
The head of development, a board member, got a suspended sentence.
>Martin Winterkorn, the CEO, has basically escaped prosecution altogether.
How so?
Winterkorn has spent the past decade getting various postponements in his trial. Now that he is approaching 80 it is unlikely he will suffer any serious punishment.
This should've happened a long time ago, and we should've made an example out of every single one of these scam artists. If it were up to me all these scumbags would be made destitute and barred from ever being anywhere near managing anything bigger than a mop.
Without these followups the public feel like they just get away, and in some cases they do. I'd argue that without seeing the punishment we are encouraging these crimes.
I'd much rather read this kind of news than whatever filler bullshit is on the front page of the news now.
It'll happen again, though probably on a smaller scale. Software like CrowdStrike's is a massive single point of failure but spending twice the money to have a backup suite on part of the network to maintain basic operations when the primary suite crashes is not very popular. The short hit to productivity is worth the emergency prep in terms of financial output, and the people spending weeks on end recovering systems are expendable anyway.
Anyone here know German? I couldn't find a good translation for the number "several."
Apparently 31 more people are targeted by further cases. (+ Winterkorn, but I wouldn't be surprised if he never makes it to trial given it's been aborted twice already due to health issues)
The downside to all this is that the bad actors get away with it. They have less skin in the game.
My view is that more people need to go to jail. Corporations would behave less like sociopathic institutions if this were done.
More specifically (vicarious liability is correct, but less specific) it is respondear superior, the liability of the principal for harmful actions of the agent within the scope of the principal-agent relationship.
As long as breaking the law only results with a fine the company has to pay, then the issue is an accounting problem for the executives, but the moment they risk going to jail, then it becomes a legal problem for them so they actually address it.
Then the executives Jens Hadler four and a half years in prison Hanno Jelden two years and seven months
Prosecutors are still investigating and trying to shake out more. This appears to be a wide conspiracy within VW.
It's the least they could do for the reputation of German engineering.
[ if (CAUGHT): toss an MBA on the barbie ]
Presumably they were blissfully unaware, and were simply pleased when VW delivered more profits, as demanded.
It is kind of ridiculous to believe that either the government of lower Saxony or the UAE or the Porsche Piech family were aware of this.
I wish someone would give me a chance to vote to repeal the personal death penalty and create the corporate death penalty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/23/boeing-737-max-crashes-doj.h... (3 days ago)
> Boeing, Justice Department reach deal to avoid prosecution over deadly 737 Max crashes
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078413 (15 comments)
It seems that at the very least manslaughter is legal in the US now, provided you pay $1.28M per victim.
When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial [1].
The VW scandal was made public in 2015 [2] and involved cheating since 2009. Sentencing only two executives to jail a decade after their wrong doing made international news does not send a strong message.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34324772
Sending own citizens to foreign country is generally big deal and not something that is done.
One more mid level engineer involved in the scandal made the mistake of taking a vacation to Florida. He was arrested in the airport awaiting his flight home to Germany [2]. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison but was let out after serving half of that sentence [3].
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
[2] https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/17/news/companies/volkswagen-e...
[3] https://www.autonews.com/automakers/ex-vw-manager-schmidt-ge...
One argument doesn't make the other in any way worse or better
I'm a German, I was not aware that VW was doing this until it came out and it was a huge blow out.
Do you think people just test their cars fume output?! You do understand that the software was build to detect being on a test stand right?
Who reverse engineers software like this...
They protest every time a company fucks up like that.