Volkswagen today has agreed to plead guilty and pay a total of $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties resulting from the company’s long-running emissions-cheating scandal. In addition, six Volkswagen employees are indicted in connection with the conspiracy.
As Compliance Week previously reported, the emissions-testing scandal dates back to 2008, when several top managers who painstakingly spent several years developing what was to be Volkswagen’s most important new diesel engine, realized these engines were not able to meet U.S. emissions standards. Not wanting to halt production and toss years of investment down the drain, managers decided instead to evade emissions standards altogether.
