Around 100 suspects in total, millions of contaminated cars, cheated customers and dealers, billions in fines – and damage to the environment and the health of many people that can hardly be quantified: the gigantic exhaust gas fraud in VW diesel cars is undoubtedly one of the biggest scandals in German industrial history, the legal one Working up will take a long time. Six years after the scandal broke, it is high time people learned how it got this far. And even if Volkswagen were a perfectly normal company, it would be difficult enough to find out who knew what in this huge empire and when. But VW is not a normal corporation, it never has been. That makes it so difficult now.
And the former boss? He’s only in the process later
It is no coincidence that many speak of a kind of “system” that controls a global empire with 600,000 people from Wolfsburg and in which millions of cars are produced. What has made this system so special for many years: Strong hierarchies and a management principle that is completely geared towards the CEO and that rigidly differentiates between above and below.
That is also why the legal appraisal, which begins this Thursday with a mammoth trial in the Braunschweiger Stadthalle, must not only be about those who are accused of commercial and gang fraud. Those engineers and screwdrivers who developed tricky software solutions and then supposedly used them in diesel cars in order to manipulate exhaust gas measurements. We have to talk about those who, as top managers, were responsible for the company and thus made the system what it was. Above all: Martin Winterkorn, VW boss from 2007 to 2015.
Unfortunately, the most prominent defendant is not there when his four ex-colleagues are tried in Braunschweig. He is unable to negotiate for health reasons. That it is his turn later and separately cannot be prevented. However, we would have loved to see the boss and his engineers meet again in Braunschweig. Above and below, united before the judge.
The now 74-year-old Winterkorn has always denied having learned of the manipulation before September 2015. For someone who has been considered a pedantic control freak and meticulous person over the years, who knew every screw and every joint, this is a surprising statement. And for someone who earned 17 million euros a year to run VW, a sobering realization: the man who cheered his engineers on every day to get better and better, more and more profitable, preferably even faster – he of all people doesn’t want to suspect any of this to have.