Audi agrees to pay US$927m ‘dieselgate’ fine
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Auto giant Volkswagen cleared a new hurdle in its “dieselgate” scandal yesterday, paying a hefty fine to close a German investigation into subsidiary Audi, but the group is not yet in the clear over its years of emissions cheating.
In a statement, Volkswagen said high-end manufacturer Audi had agreed to pay an 800-million-euro (US$927 million) fine issued by Munich prosecutors.
“Audi AG has accepted the fine” for “deviations from regulatory requirements in certain V6 and V8 diesel aggregates (motors) and diesel vehicles,” the group said.
In their own communique, Munich prosecutors confirmed their so-called “administrative proceeding” against Audi was now “closed.”
VW admitted in 2015 to building so-called “defeat devices” into 11 million cars worldwide, in a massive cheating scandal dubbed “dieselgate.”
Software allowed vehicles to appear to meet emissions rules under lab conditions, while in fact spewing many times more harmful gases like nitrogen oxides on the road.
Yesterday’s fine brings the total costs to Volkswagen from “dieselgate” to more than 28 billion euros since 2015 — most of that in penalties, buybacks and refits in the United States.
VW paid a 1 billion euro penalty to Brunswick prosecutors in June over its own-brand vehicles.
The fines leave just sports car subsidiary Porsche still facing an “administrative” diesel case among the group’s companies.
And while the June fine flowed into a total of 1.6 billion euros paid out over “dieselgate” in the second quarter, the car giant reported profits up 3.4 percent year on year between April and June, at 3.3 billion.
Relieved investors welcomed the Audi news.
Despite yesterday’s agreement, other probes against individual managers and executives from the VW group remain open.
Targets include former chief executives Martin Winterkorn and Matthias Mueller, present VW boss Herbert Diess and supervisory board chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch.
At Audi itself, former chief executive Rupert Stadler was removed from his post by VW earlier this month.
Prosecutors had jailed him in June, saying this was necessary to stop him trying to influence witnesses in his case over fraud and issuing false certificates.
In a Brunswick court case, investors are pursuing Volkswagen with claims totaling some 9.0 billion euros over the shares’ 40-percent plunge in value in the days after “dieselgate” was unveiled.
They say executives should have informed them sooner of the risks to the group.
And a similar case with a potential billion-euro price tag is under way in Stuttgart against holding company Porsche SE, which owns a controlling stake in VW.
The German government has opened a route for car owners to launch collective cases against the manufacturers, with a first one expected for early November. The “dieselgate” fallout is far from confined to Volkswagen. German stalwarts like BMW and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler have also become the targets of official probes, while French-owned Opel faced a new investigation on Monday.
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