If this were a car race, then the whole thing would just turn into the home stretch. And indeed, we’re talking about cars here – those with four rings on the radiator grille and diesel engines under the hood. But it’s a criminal case. So on Tuesday prosecutor Nico Petzka held his plea in the proceedings against former Audi boss Rupert Stadler, former head of engine development and later Porsche board member Wolfgang Hatz and former engineer Giovanni P.
The court has already been hearing for 170 days, well over two and a half years – “and we can already close the taking of evidence,” said the presiding judge Stefan Weickert in the morning. For many months, the process had therefore tormented itself with the technical details of diesel engines and defeat devices and the special features of sales in the USA and Germany.
But it wasn’t until the end of March that the court was so sure of its case that it offered the accused the deal: confessions and monetary conditions in return for suspended sentences of between one and a half and two years. Otherwise jail. An offer that Stadler recently accepted: Four weeks ago he had his lawyer concede the allegations of the prosecution. He also wants to pay 1.1 million euros. Hatz and Giovanni P. had already confessed at the end of April.
Now the prosecution is satisfied if the accused get away without prison – at least in the case of Stadler and Giovanni P. In his plea, the public prosecutor calls for two years of probation and 1.1 million euros in money for the ex-Audi boss and also two Years for the former engineer, also on probation, plus the payment of 50,000 euros. For Wolfgang Hatz, on the other hand, the public prosecutor’s office is demanding prison, which Petzka had hinted at weeks ago. On Tuesday he now specifies: three years and two months – without probation.
“A multitude of individual wrong decisions”
It was a “really extraordinarily extensive process material,” says Petzka on Tuesday. But it is also “a lengthy and laborious undertaking” to approach reality in a corporation using the means of the rule of law. The result is quite manageable: the three defendants “each in very responsible positions made significant contributions to the overall situation,” says Petzka. Nevertheless, in the diesel scandal they could “not be considered criminally the “Mainly responsible” for the fraud. At Audi, “many people involved went in the wrong direction”, over the years “a large number of individual wrong decisions” were made throughout the company and thus an “enormous number” of cars were manipulated.
It had sounded very different at the beginning of the trial. In the summer of 2018, investigators even had Stadler arrested. During the months in prison, the investigators dealt with him harshly, as interrogation records show. Not much of that is left now. The tampering with the VW Group’s diesel engines had already been discovered three years earlier in the USA: They were only clean on the test stand, but on the road, at full power and full comfort, they blew far more nitrogen oxides into the air, which were harmful to health and the environment air than allowed. A huge economic scandal ensued, with millions of customers being deceived and billions of euros in damage.
The verdict is due in two weeks
For the Munich trial alone, the public prosecutor’s office is now assuming that almost 100,000 souped-up six and eight-cylinder diesels were sold between the end of 2008 and the end of 2015 under the aegis of Hatz and P. to US importers, German dealers and the group’s own leasing company , with total damage of around 2.2 billion euros. When everything was blown up, Stadler did not prevent another 27,000 manipulated cars from being sold in Germany between the end of 2015 and the end of 2017, here with damage of around 69 million euros.
Stadler’s contribution to the crime was “not particularly important,” says Petzka. He also doesn’t think it’s “certain that Mr. Stadler knew for sure that the vehicles had been manipulated”. He only had to assume it and then didn’t ask any more questions. In addition, he should have informed the buyers that there were doubts about the diesel engines and cleared up the fraud. The verdict is due in two weeks.