VW Execs Lawyer Up Following US Justice Department Pressure

With its current leadership on its way out, the US Justice Department has been ramping up its efforts to build a case against Volkswagen’s top brass following the TDI scandal.

The department has been meeting with managers and US authorities have even traveled to Germany to gather evidence in the criminal case against Volkswagen’s executives.

Following accusations of a lack of accountability following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Justice Department has been tasked with keeping the executives behind corporate misdeeds accountable.

As a result, many VW executives have begun hiring US criminal defense attorneys.

“Volkswagen continues to cooperate with the Department of Justice as we work to resolve remaining matters in the United States,” Eric Felber, a Justice Department spokesman, told Bloomberg.

It isn’t clear just who the criminal case will focus on, though, as an investigation conducted by a US law firm at VW’s request, found that the top brass did not know about the emissions rigging.

So far, one former software engineer has pleaded guilty in the case, but otherwise the only casualties of the case have been the executives who resigned or were forced out of the company, like former CEO Martin Winterkorn.

VW meanwhile maintains the innocence of its executives. “The then and current board of management of Volkswagen AG had, at any rate, no knowledge of the use of unlawful engine-management software at the time,” wrote Volkswagen in its annual report for 2015.

All of this, plus the trouble of trying Germans (a country that cannot constitutionally extradite its citizens outside of the EU) means that a resolution of the criminal case against VW is unlikely to come before president-elect Trump takes office.

His likely pick for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, though, has said in the past that he would go after a large company if there was evidence of criminal conduct.

[source: Bloomberg]

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