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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.
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.
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
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.
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.