A high fine has been imposed on the automotive supplier Continental. Investigators accuse the company of negligently violating its supervisory obligations in connection with the diesel scandal.
The automotive supplier Continental has to pay a fine of 100 million euros in connection with the VW diesel scandal for violating a supervisory obligation. The Hanover public prosecutor announced this today. From mid-2007, the former drive division of the DAX group, which now operates under the name Vitesco, delivered more than twelve million engine control units with which emissions values were manipulated.
The software of the devices ensured that diesel engines only met the limit values for nitrogen oxide when tested, but that they emitted more pollutants than permitted when driving on the road. The technology was also used in Volkswagen’s EA 189 diesel engine, which was at the center of the emissions scandal that was exposed in 2015.
Money goes to the state of Lower Saxony
Continental announced that the company did not want to take legal action. It is in the company’s interest that the process is ended. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the payment should flow within six weeks to the state of Lower Saxony, which is the recipient of the fine according to the law.
The fine consists of a five million euro penalty and a 95 million euro disgorgement of economic benefits. The automotive supplier said that the fine would not lead to any significant additional burden on earnings as provisions had been made in previous years. Based on the separation agreement between Continental and Vitesco, the drive specialist ultimately has to pay the fine.
Conti’s legal director, Olaf Schick, pointed out that the supplier had learned its lessons from the scandal: “We have given the issue of integrity the highest priority, have restructured it organizationally and trained the employees intensively.”
VW had to pay billions
All major suppliers were involved in the diesel scandal: ZF Friedrichshafen had to pay a fine of 42.5 million euros in 2020 for negligent violation of supervisory obligations in connection with the manipulation of the exhaust gas purification of diesel vehicles. In 2019, the Stuttgart public prosecutor’s office imposed a fine of 90 million euros on the world’s largest supplier Bosch for the same matter.
In the case of the Volkswagen Group, the fines amounted to one billion euros. Compensation for the emissions scandal in the form of fines, damages and legal fees has so far cost Volkswagen more than 32 billion euros. Violations of the supervisory obligation at the VW subsidiaries Audi and Porsche as well as at Daimler (now Mercedes-Benz) were punished with high three-digit million amounts.