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Volkswagen Executive Faces Jail Time After Guilty Plea (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
A former Volkswagen executive has pleaded guilty to two charges related to the company's diesel emissions scandal. He is the second VW Group employee to do so, following retired engineer James Liang pleading guilty last summer. The VW Group executive, Oliver Schmidt, was based outside of Detroit and was in charge of emissions compliance for Volkswagen in the years before the company was caught using illegal software to cheat on federal emissions tests.
Schmidt, a German citizen who was 48 when he was arrested in Miami in January on vacation, was originally charged with 11 felony counts. In accepting a plea deal from US federal officials, Schmidt will only plead guilty to two charges: conspiracy to defraud the US government and violate the Clean Air Act, and making a false statement under the Clean Air Act. Schmidt will be sentenced in December. He could face up to seven years in prison, as well as fines from $40,000 to $400,000, according to the plea agreement. After that, Schmidt could also be required to serve four years of supervised release.
Schmidt, a German citizen who was 48 when he was arrested in Miami in January on vacation, was originally charged with 11 felony counts. In accepting a plea deal from US federal officials, Schmidt will only plead guilty to two charges: conspiracy to defraud the US government and violate the Clean Air Act, and making a false statement under the Clean Air Act. Schmidt will be sentenced in December. He could face up to seven years in prison, as well as fines from $40,000 to $400,000, according to the plea agreement. After that, Schmidt could also be required to serve four years of supervised release.
We can use a VW Beetle.
A better punishment would be to punish the company as a whole:
- Force Volkswagaon to buy back all of the affected vehicles - at their original value, regardless of how old it is.
- Give every customer of an effected car, at minimum, $5000 extra for the inconvenience and deception.
- Every new car off the assembly line must an electric vehicle AND to be sold at the same price as a similar gas powered car. Even if it is at a loss.
Make the company bleed out a little bit. Nothing makes a company act straight other than the threat of losing money.
. . . jail is for poor folks . . . as every American Kid says during the morning roll call:
With freedom and justice . . . for the rich . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It is a German company we are talking about. Their level of documentation and verification are phenomenal. Anyone who sold software to VW would know. They store all the results of all the prior use of the software that was used. They rerun the software after every version upgrade. And they demand every difference to be explained.
No way this diesel emission scandal is some handywork of some rogue group or division. Everyone from the very top knew, they approved and they monitored the deception from the get go.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Schmidt, a German citizen who was 48 when he was arrested in Miami in January on vacation...
Arrested him on vacation? You Germans are savages. Heh.
I have to say, I kind of like the fact that members of industry are held accountable for the Company's actions. We have no like study to reference over here in the Americas.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Any time a corporate executive is jailed, for whatever reason, it's good for everyone.
I subscribe to "broken windows theory" when it comes to corporate crime. If you let one get away with even a minor crime, the rest will think it's OK to do something a little bigger, until we end up with what we've got now.
Better to make an example of a few executives. Don't put them in any country club prison, either. Use public stocks, heads on pikes, I don't care. Just let them know they are not the masters of the universe.
You are welcome on my lawn.
He committed the most grievous of sins, he cost everybody a lot of money when he got caught.
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Those guys never do time
This guy is not going to prison. He's gonna pay a big fine. That's all.
If on the off chance that he does go to prison, he's gonna go to country-club prison and probably collect his entire salary as hush money when he gets out anyway.
If any of this was real, it would be for more than the one guy who happened to be on vacation in the US when they decided to make an example.
I don't buy this theater for a second.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Amazing to me that TWO Volkswagen execs have been found criminally liable for this, and only one exec from ALL OF THE BANKS was found criminally liable for any of the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. Other commenters are saying that they're going to jail because they cost people money, but what Volkswagen cost people is peanuts compared to what bankers cost people, so that doesn't really square with me.
such as NSA employees, or why not Google and Apple employees, given how often they conspire and only get fined, to make it clear that Europe can play the same game.
... to let the responsible VW executives breathe the lovely fumes from their oh-so-clean Diesels. I'm sure they could modify some VW Diesel for this.
If crooked Hillary's not going to jail, no one is.
Google is in a passel of trouble in the EU right now for behavior illegal in the EU, as is Facebook.
Will we be seeing Google execs arrested as well? Why should Google get to be "special", if VW execs are being arrested over their company's illegal behavior?
Those are the kind of things that won't make a company change its practices, only retreat further into finding new ways to hide cheating software while simultaneously not helping the people who get cars (VW was hardly the only car manufacturer to engage in this cheating).
Freeing the car software by distributing complete source code and build/install instructions under a free software license plus making cars that use the same or compatible software would help the car owner far more. This is entirely reasonable to demand on its own sake as an affected vehicle owner and precisely because this case highlights the unjust power over everyone's need to breathe cleaner air. As a minor practical matter, car owners who aren't so technical could take a copy of the software to someone they trust for inspection, modification, and reinstallation (just as car owners take their cars to garages, detail cleaners, tire shops, and any other specialist firm to get work done). It's worth noting that my call is not a call for "open source" or "opening" anything. The open source development methodology is quite content to throw aside its own message if that development methodology gets in the way of business desires for control over the user (as is the heart of the case both in this scandal and in this discussion thread). The older free software social movement has the right take on things: demand respect for users' software freedom to liberate users from the control of proprietary software.
Software freedom (respecting a computer user's freedoms to run, share, and modify software at any time for any reason even commercially) is valuable for its own sake and the car manufacturers know it. That's why they're willing to pay some money or send a small number of people to jail now. Those steps protect their ability to cheat again leveraging the power of proprietary software (user-subjugating software) when they think they can get away with it.
Digital Citizen
That fact that you liberal fuckers think this is a criminal offense is just one more reason you're going to the gulag.
Make the company bleed out a little bit. Nothing makes a company act straight other than the threat of losing money.
All this does is punish the shareholders and employees of the company who will lose their investment and their job respectively when the company goes bankrupt. The overwhelming majority of these people are not responsible for the crime committed. Putting the executives and employees who were responsible for the decision in jail as well as huge fines ($400k seems small given the likely salary of the executive) holds them accountable for the decisions which they are responsible for.
The more punishments like this the better because it will make executives realize that they cannot let their employees and shareholders take the hit for them if they commit crimes. The shareholders are still on the hook for the financial fallout of this crime which is reasonable because technically they are responsible for overseeing management (although the modern corporate structure makes that very hard for them to do in reality). If previous cases of corporate malfeasance had resulted in jail time and financially significant fines for the executives involved instead of just fining the company perhaps there would not have been a Volkswagen fraud case.
With freedom and justice . . . for the rich . . .
No matter how rich he is this guy cannot have both because justice requires denying him his freedom. Being rich just means is that he is more likely to get freedom over justice.
What Volkswagen did was really easy for almost everyone to understand and so very hard to wriggle out of. The problem with bankers is that the laws they violate are amazingly complex and very hard for juries to understand. This gives them a lot more wriggle room to weasel out of criminal charges.
Defence lawyers know this and use it to fiddle the jury pool. My uncle was a UK bank inspector and sometimes had to sit in on trials for bank managers he caught on the fiddle. He always used to claim that jury selection was often done by which newspaper the prospective jurors were carrying: "The Sun", "Daily Mail" or equivalent were fine but show up with "The Times" or, worse, "The Financial Times" they would hardly be in the room before some objection to them was found. After that, anyone with a university degree was the next target for removal because if you can't really understand the crime because it is so complex then there is bound to be reasonable doubt that someone committed it.
No, because that would be unfair if the EU gouges an US based corporation. Who does the EU think they are enforcing their stupid laws on foreign corporations?
Making the company bleed quite a bit is what happened up to now. What you propose would kill it. Now whether you want to kill it may be up your objective, but keep in mind that 99% of the people working there had nothing to do with the scandal, it was mostly executive and engineer. That is why personally I am against punishing companies that far, I am on the other hand for punishing executive and other people doing the illegal action that far, with possibly *consecutive* penalty rather than parallel.
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What the banks did back in 2008 was maybe malicious, unethical, stupid etc.... But not illegal - that is why we tryed to change the law with, laws that republican in their immense wisdom repelled (/sarcasm). On the other hand what VW did was downright illegal. That is the main difference.
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The EU is welcome to try it and face the consequences. Say what you want about President Obama, he did a great job of bringing the EU to heel: he forced them to enact sanctions against Russia that cost them billions and destroyed thousands of jobs - and this in an already sinking economy - and aimed a very big gun at the German car industry which is the engine of the EU economy. There was panic high up in Brussels back then, they knew the US could ruin Europe for good with no chance of recovery ever. They also knew that the reprieve they had came at a very high cost but that there was no way out. The gun is still aimed and Germany faces economic obliteration at any time. What saved them from having to fully having to align with US policies forever is that Americans chose the wrong president. Had they chose Clinton, all of Europe would be a US protectorate now.
with a singular hive mind. There are bad people at VW who want to cheat, and there are good people at VW who want to do the right thing. We could institute your punishment and basically force the company into bankruptcy, punishing the good people along with the bad. The good people would have to find new jobs at other companies, if they can, and suffer financial burden while they're searching. But more crucially the bad people would scatter to other companies, free to try to cheat again in other industries.
I'd rather do what's going on here - charge the bad people and fine them or jail them. Give the bad people still out there something to think about if they're considering cheating. Give the good people remaining at VW a chance to salvage the company and turn it into something good. The corporate veil should insulate individuals from liability against financial losses and unintentional harm. But if you knowingly commit a crime or cause the company to commit a crime while working at a corporation, you should personally be criminally liable.
Let's hope so. However, there haven't been any criminal investigations against General Motors and Ford in Europe, despite the fact that they pulled the same trick as VW and everyone else, but with much higher real-world emissions, so I'm not expecting much...
A rich person? Going to prison for a crime that affected millions of people and defrauded them and the government of billions of dollars?
Some mistake surely.
Those guys never do time
There was only one bank which ended up getting prosecuted for the '08 mortgage crisis. A tiny Chinatown family-owned bank that discovered one of their loan officers taking bribes and making fraudulent mortgage applications. The managers of the bank promptly reported him to regulators -- for which the managers were indicted, with the fraudulent loan officer becoming the star witness for the prosecution against the bank.
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/18/...
"As it happens, Abacus didn't deal in subprime. The Chinatown-based bank also didn't package its mortgages into the sort of financial instruments that made The Big Short's machinations so arcane. In fact, the bank had one of the lowest default rates in the country."
Some other articles on the prosecution of Abacus:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/1...