Manfred Döss is one of the four or five most important managers at Volkswagen, but apparently he doesn’t care about status symbols. Even in Corona times it happened that he visited important branch offices of the car company by train and S-Bahn. Pulling a rolling suitcase behind you instead of being driven up in a luxury limousine. And making do with buttered pretzels from the canteen at meetings. The main thing is that he can say what he has to say.
And Döss, 63 years old, a lawyer, has a lot to say in the global VW empire. Although he has not even been a member of the group’s board of directors – which Herbert Diess leads and apparently continues to do so. Head of Legal, is Döss’ title. Or chief legal counsel. That word about the legal advisor could easily be deleted from this word. Volkswagen actually has two bosses: Herbert Diess for day-to-day business. And Manfred Döss for dealing with the emissions scandal, which is about nothing less than the existence of the car company with more than 650,000 employees.
The fact that the hands-on lawyer should now move up to the boardroom as the board of directors for integrity and law is more of a formality. The power that Döss would thus officially acquire has in fact long been acquired: power through hard work, through good relationships and, above all, through great success. The experienced lawyer, who can be tough and sociable at the same time, has helped twice in dire need. For the benefit of the group and for the benefit of its main owners, the Porsche and Piëch families.
The empire of the Porsches and Piëchs was in danger, the lawyer was able to help
The two billionaire clans owe a lot to Döss, who has long been one of the most influential corporate lawyers in Germany. After a fierce takeover battle between the small sports car manufacturer Porsche in Stuttgart and the large VW group in Wolfsburg, the suspicion arose that the stock market price of Volkswagen had been manipulated. Shareholders and investors sued for damages in the billions, the empire of Porsches and Piëchs was in danger. But Döss, hired by the Porsches and Piëchs, fended off all attacks.
Then came the even more threatening emissions scandal. The board of directors and the supervisory board had Döss done. He traveled several times to the USA, where the exhaust gas manipulation in diesel vehicles was exposed. And where compensation payments and fines of more than $ 60 billion threatened. For years, VW managers had deceived US authorities and fooled them; the first thing to do was to get into the conversation again.
Hiltrud Werner has been responsible for compliance so far and will probably be leaving soon.
(Photo: MDR; Hoferichter & Jacobs)
Döss and his people were treated “like the last assholes”, says one who experienced that at the time. In the first round of negotiations, there wasn’t even a glass of water for the German guests. But Döss and the then VW sales director Francisco Javier García Sanz managed to break the front lines. At some point even beer was tapped. And where better than with beer can compromises be made. You can do that with Döss, he is not averse to humor and irony, also with a view to himself: Of course you can attack him, he said once and grinned. But then you have to keep your format in mind. Döss is, to put it this way, more of a large format.
On January 11, 2017, this man then signed a document as “General Counsel” of VW, which limited the financial burden for the car company in the USA to around half of the originally threatened amount. Döss even managed to exclude certain facts that could have been expensive for Volkswagen in the rest of the world. And the CEOs, first Matthias Müller and now Herbert Diess, were and are happy that someone is pulling the potatoes out of the fire for them.
Döss had to deal with tricky cases early on
Döss, who comes from Rheinhessen, studied law in Mainz, where he was an assistant at the university before he worked for the systems manufacturer MG Technologies and the energy company RWE. Even there, Döss had to deal with tricky cases, some of which he tried to solve in an unconventional way; prefer to act in the background. Someone who knows him well describes him as follows: He fights his battles in negotiation rounds and in court, but not through the media. And at the energy company RWE in particular, he learned to deal with complex ownership structures: there, too, the state has a say, there too there are very strong employee representatives.
Later the Porsches and Piëchs made him the legal director of their holding company Porsche SE, the main shareholder of Volkswagen. Döss also became Head of Legal at VW. In the car company he was formally subordinate to the board members responsible for legal matters. That was first the former constitutional judge Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt and then her successor Hiltrud Werner, who will probably leave soon.
The first constellation was fraught with conflict, Hohmann-Dennhardt actually wanted to conduct the US negotiations himself, which would have been difficult because of the language hurdle. Her successor on the board, Werner, however, accepted the division: Döss, the man for the tough paragraphs. She, on the other hand, was primarily concerned with the political side of law – such as the challenging supervision of the US stock exchange supervisory authority – and the aspect of legal compliance, which is so important at Volkswagen, called compliance: When should a subordinate engineer report dubious work orders from a supervisor? How can women work well in this male-dominated company? How can the term diversity be spelled? And: When can a big technical promise to customers possibly hardly be kept?
Will Döss now also make good work culture his topic? Observers doubt it a little – but point to another strength, that of the power culture: Hohmann-Dennhardt and Werner were, in a sense, subordinate to Döss at the same time – because he is also a board member of the VW owner company Porsche-SE. Such confused constellations, which are detrimental to beneficial coexistence, can be found again and again at Volkswagen. VW is not a normal corporation, as the many affairs and power struggles of recent years show. In order to assert oneself at Volkswagen, you obviously need elbows made of stainless steel. This is exactly what Döss is said to be.
And he should use it in a team that will apparently continue to be led by Herbert Diess. The Reuters news agency had reported that a solution had been found in the leadership dispute, and that too Southgerman newspaper perceived the corresponding gentle cues on Monday evening – however, the situation is still too ambiguous to declare the crisis to be over. At least it is now considered likely that what everyone expected will happen: VW brand boss Ralf Brandstätter is to take over the management of the so-called volume brands from Diess. He would then be the third new addition to the group’s board of directors, alongside IT director Hauke Stars and, of course, Manfred Döss.