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MUNICH (dpa-AFX) – The former Audi boss wants to be the first Volkswagen (Volkswagen (VW) vz) group board member Rupert Stadler Confess to fraud in the sale of diesel cars with beautified emission values. With a simple “yes”, Stadler confirmed on Wednesday before the Munich Regional Court that he would make a comprehensive confession. The Economic Criminal Court had promised him a suspended sentence.
The public prosecutor also agreed to the arrangement. The presiding judge Stefan Weickert determined that the agreement proposed by the Economic Criminal Court was reached. He wants to announce the verdict in June.
According to the chamber, Stadler should have recognized by July 2016 at the latest that the exhaust gas values of the large Audi diesel engines could have been manipulated. Instead of getting to the bottom of the matter and informing the dealers, he allowed production and sale of the cars to continue until early 2018. The court therefore threatened him with a prison sentence for fraud by omission – but at the same time gave him the prospect of suspending it on probation if he made a comprehensive confession and paid 1.1 million euros.
After five weeks of reflection, the 60-year-old Stadler now agreed to the court’s offer. His defense attorney Thilo Pfordte announced that he would present his confession to the court in two weeks.
For years, the former Audi boss had protested his innocence, stressed his role as an enlightener and said he had been duped by his technicians. Most recently, the defense and the prosecutor were still struggling to determine the amount of the probation condition – prosecutor Nico Petzka had demanded two million euros. But with the agreement, the way is open for a legally binding judgment that saves the court from an appeal and the other parties involved possibly years of further legal disputes. Thus, Stadler should soon leave the court as a convicted fraudster but a free man.
The three co-defendants – the former head of Audi engine development, Wolfgang Hatz, and two of his senior engineers – have already confessed that they had initiated the design of the engine software. With impermissible defeat devices, the cars did comply with the nitrogen oxide limit values on the test bench, but not on the road. The car manufacturers wanted to save themselves the time-consuming subsequent installation of larger AdBlue tanks for exhaust gas cleaning.
The chamber had already discontinued the proceedings against an engineer who had appeared as a key witness four weeks ago. One after the other, his boss Giovanni P., the head of Audi engines and later Porsche board member Hatz and the former chairman of the board Stadler agreed to the suspended sentence of between one and a half and two years offered by the court to all three. Only in Hatz’s case did the public prosecutor’s office reject a deal and demand a prison sentence.
Rupert Stadler became head of the Ingolstadt-based VW (Volkswagen (VW) vz) subsidiary in 2007, succeeding Martin Winterkorn, who was moving to the top of the group at the time. Under Stadler’s leadership, Audi had doubled sales and operating profit and overtaken Mercedes (Mercedes-Benz Group (ex-Daimler)) in sales. When the US authorities uncovered the trickery in VW diesel engines at the end of 2015, and a little later also in large Audi diesel engines in models for the US market, he thought he was safe for a long time. When Federal Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt accused Audi of selling cars with defeat devices in Europe in mid-2017, Stadler reacted with outrage.
Then the crash followed. From June 2018, Stadler was in custody because of the risk of collusion – for four months until he resigned as Audi boss and VW board member. He has now paid 4.1 million euros to the Volkswagen Group for breach of duty.
Four former top managers of the Volkswagen Group have been on trial in Braunschweig since September 2021 for possible fraud in the diesel affair. The case against former VW CEO Winterkorn is on hold due to illness./rol/DP/jha
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