Germany charges six Volkswagen executives over Dieselgate

German prosecutors have charged six Volkswagen managers with fraud, accusing them of “deliberately misleading” authorities and customers in the run-up to the diesel emissions scandal in 2015, by failing to disclose the existence of cheat devices.

The 876-page indictment, which does not name those accused, alleges that three executives “knowingly and willingly participated in the development, refinement and improvement of manipulation software”. 

Three others “aided and abetted” those acts, the prosecutors said. Last year, similar charges were brought against the carmaker’s former chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, and four more VW employees. 

In a statement on Tuesday, public prosecutors in Braunschweig, close to VW’s headquarters, said that 9m vehicles were illegally registered for road use in the years before the Dieselgate affair was made public. Vehicles in Germany were also wrongly exempted from road tax, the prosecutors claimed. Investigations into 32 other defendants are continuing. 

VW said the carmaker would not comment on investigations against individuals. A criminal investigation by the public prosecutor against Volkswagen as a company was closed in 2018, after the payment of a €1bn fine, the company said.

The new charges were made public just over an hour after Volkswagen Group, which includes brands such as Audi and Porsche, announced it had sold a record 10.97m vehicles in 2019. Sales in Germany grew more than 6 per cent, although they declined in the Asia-Pacific region, Volkswagen’s largest market.

This year looks likely to be critical for Volkswagen’s electric car business. The group must sell hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles, or risk large fines from Brussels because of new EU-wide carbon emissions regulations that came into effect in 2020.

Volkswagen is also wrestling with a litany of other legal woes. In September, prosecutors charged Volkswagen’s chief executive Herbert Diess, its chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch, and Mr Winterkorn with market manipulation, for allegedly withholding information from shareholders about emissions cheating. VW called those allegations “groundless”.

The company is also in the midst of negotiating a possible settlement in a group action lawsuit brought by more than 400,000 VW customers in Germany. It faces a similar, albeit smaller, case in the UK.

Shareholders are seeking more than €9bn in damages from the Wolfsburg-based carmaker, arguing that they lost money following Dieselgate, and that they should have been alerted as soon as management knew of the installation of cheat devices in VW cars.

This month, a similar case was brought against Daimler, with more than 200 institutional investors seeking €900m from the Mercedes-Benz owner.