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Volkswagen Fined One Billion Euros By German Prosecutors Over Emissions Cheating (reuters.com)
Volkswagen was fined one billion euros ($1.18 billion) over diesel emissions cheating in what amounts to one of the highest ever fines imposed by German authorities against a company, public prosecutors said on Wednesday. From a report: The German fine follows a U.S. plea agreement from January 2017 when VW agreed to pay $4.3 billion to resolve criminal and civil penalties for installing illegal software in diesel engines to cheat strict U.S. anti-pollution tests. "Following thorough examination, Volkswagen AG accepted the fine and it will not lodge an appeal against it. Volkswagen AG, by doing so, admits its responsibility for the diesel crisis and considers this as a further major step toward the latter being overcome," it said in a statement. The fine is the latest blow to Germany's auto industry which cannot seem to catch a break from the diesel emissions crisis. Germany's government on Monday ordered Daimler to recall nearly 240,000 cars fitted with illicit emissions-control devices, part of a total of 774,000 models affected in Europe as a whole.
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I don't think this'll cover damages to folks health did to dirty air let alone be more than the profit they made cheating. Until we find them more than the money they made they're gonna keep doing this crap.
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The poor, poor oppressed company. It's awful they're being held accountable to the law like us little people are. So unfair!
I'm assuming, since it was the German people whom suffered the effects of the increased pollution, the monies collected will be equally distributed amongst the German population. At 82 million people, that will come out to around 14 Euro per person. Seems fair.
Prison got your tongue?
now is the time to pick up a volkswagon for cheap...
We shouldn't have fined them, we should have imposed a punitive tariff per vehicle that would amount to the same fine, if sales held up, which they wouldn't, die VW die ha ha ha
...not the company. Otherwise the price of my spare parts will go up !
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The perps are in their mansions, not in jail.
The perps are not going to pay the fine. There is no clawback provision to get back the bonuses and salaries and incentives they got for achieving the goals by cheating.
The shareholders should sue the board and ask them to pay the fine without using company funds.
Board might sue the old office holders and get the money from them.
But none of that will happen. So next scandal will happen. There is no effective way to punish the Criminal Executive Officers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The government can return the money as tax deductions next year, or the next one, if need be. What should be done, and curiously enough isn't, is to apply the law and forbid the sales of non emission-compliant cars. Most models sold even today are still non compliant, and sold without anybody saying anything. That makes a fool of the law, and of the consumers.
Instead they give a fine. Great. If anybody, the regulators should be fined. They simply "trusted" the manufacturers, instead of doing a proper independent road test of the new models. It's obvious that everybody was in the deception, and worse still, they still are.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Is that one long scale billion Euros or one short scale billion? T (corrected-link; thanks divide overflow) FA's headline uses a long spelling of billlion [sic], so presumably Reuters is rooting for long scale.
Because it's not just Volkwagen who put software cheats into their car computers but Mercedes Benz and BMW too. Those latter two must have made sure their legislators were well bought off.
Perhaps if we start publicly caning the board of directors when a company is caught in egregious wrong doing, we'll find businesses regulate themselves a lot better from the very top.
Gotta love environmental regulations which serve to enable largish fines like this* but.... how does this help the citizens, whose health is nominally protected by this legislation?
(*) equivalent to the penalty for downloading close to a hundred mp3s!!, but I digress...---^
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They should be forced to essentially 'buy' back ALL of the effected cars.
Not at current value, but at the original value of the vehicle at the day of sale.
Maybe a heavy loss of having to buy back all of those vehicles, and and then not being able to sell them ever, would be enough of a punishment.
Any laws you think exist, are only s real as there are people enforcing them.
Which is why the sensibleness of property laws is questionable, and that of imaginary property laws is delusional (apart from only existing to let cokeheads steal money from those who actually work): They are impossible to enforce (unless you accept gapless total surveillance. As a single gap suffices.)
Big companies just got a bigger lever. That is all.
Com on, this is ridiculous... if you fine VW for that then you should shoot Elon musk and close tesla (and others alike)
Capitalist Scum. FUCK YOU
Who would have thought a company founded by Adolf Hitler would do something unethical?
There is only one way that the German auto industry will ever get a break from diesel scandals, and that is to stop making them. VW at least appears to be on the path to doing just that; the company is aggressively pushing forward with EV development and sales.