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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.
The poor, poor oppressed company. It's awful they're being held accountable to the law like us little people are. So unfair!
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.
I find it curious that when individual people do bad things, we tend to go to jail, at least fairly often, but when a company does bad things, seldom anyone goes to jail. There needs to be a point where crimes that hurt a lot of people that are caused by deliberate actions result in the people ultimately in charge going to jail.
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
You can't just claim damages due to "dirty air"
Of course you can. The air would have been much less polluted if Volkswagen and the others hadn't cheated.
at most you could claim damages for much dirtier the air has gotten due to Volkswagen not quite meeting the Euro-6 norm or whatever it is.
There is no "not quite" about it when we are talking about more than an order or magnitude. This is not astronomy.
It's not in anyone's interest to cripple this company
It is absolutely in my interest to cripple them. I have zero faith that they will not do the exact same thing the next time they think they can get away with it.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
That is actually an excellent point!
A suitable punishment would be to take away all government-granted monopolies, since they do not play by the rules of the government. Goodbye Volkswagen patents!
That would benefit the owners of Volkswagen vehicles, who were defrauded and who have so far not had a penny in compensation (at least in Europe).
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I think the issue has to do more with shared or diffused responsibility in groups. The larger the group, the less likely anyone is to get in trouble for it because it's more difficult to attribute the harm to any one person's action. It's the same in large religions or political groups when there's some kind of scandal. At best you might get one or two people thrown under the bus, but you're not even guaranteed that much.
Should you automatically put the CEO in jail if they weren't responsible and had no part in the wrong doing? What if they were the person who noticed something was wrong and blew the whistle on the wrong doing?
What about the more morally gray cases where the upper management is pushing hard for results and some of the underlings interpret these directives is creative, yet illegal or unethical ways? We can establish that the CEO might have ultimately caused the behavior, but they never asked for something illegal.
We could further descend the ladder until we get the bottom rung where the CEO has a signed letter in blood telling everyone to kill and rape babies to increase profits where it's pretty clear that they need to go away for a long while. However, the point is that where in there is the line where you know exactly which people need to go to jail and which people don't?
With an individual crime it's a lot easier for a jury to wrap their head around what happened and there are far fewer conflicting versions of events. Try to put a group on trial, and no one really knows who to trust when all of the fingers start getting pointed and there's always enough plausible deniability or presumption of innocence that it's a lot harder to get a jury to convict. Also, a large organization is going to have a lot of money to spend on lawyers. Much like a celebrity, they can afford the best legal talent so you're more likely to get away with murder, figuratively and likely literally as well.