Exec pleads guilty in ‘dieselgate’
Apple to build new US plants: Trump
AVOLKSWAGEN executive accused of helping to cover up the automaker’s diesel emissions fraud has agreed to plead guilty in federal court next week, a development that could bolster the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute individuals involved in the scandal.
On Tuesday, lawyers for the executive, Oliver Schmidt, a German who was arrested in Miami in January, told a judge for the Eastern District of Michigan that their client had decided to enter a guilty plea at a hearing scheduled for August 4.
Schmidt, 48, former head of Volkswagen’s environmental and engineering centre in Auburn Hills, Michigan, has been accused of knowingly providing false information to US regulators who became suspicious about the emissions of Volkswagen diesel vehicles in 2014.
The following year, Volkswagen admitted that it had rigged diesel models with software – known as a defeat device – that enabled the vehicles to pass emissions tests allowing vehicles to spew far more pollutants outside testing labs. More than 11 million cars worldwide were equipped with the software, including 600,000 in the United States.
Volkswagen later pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to violate the Clean Air Act, customs violations and obstruction of justice.
The automaker has also agreed to pay $4.3 billion in civil and criminal penalties in the case brought by the Justice Department – part of $22 billion in settlements and fines Volkswagen is paying out in the US, making it one of the costliest corporate scandals in history.
Schmidt’s cooperation would be a coup for the Justice Department’s case against Volkswagen. Schmidt is one of eight former Volkswagen executives who have been charged in the United States. The others are in Germany, and almost all are unlikely to face trials in the US because Germany does not extradite its citizens.
Volkswagen declined to comment on Schmidt’s plea agree- ment but said in a statement that it “continues to cooperate with investigations by the Department of Justice into the conduct of individuals”.
Schmidt is facing 11 felony counts and a maximum sentence of 169 years in prison. It is unclear to which charges he will plead guilty. Both his attorney, David DuMouchel, and a spokeswoman for the US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan declined to comment. It is also unclear if he will agree to cooperate with prosecutors as a condition of his plea, although that is typical in such agreements.
Previously, Schmidt’s lawyers had indicated in court documents they planned to argue that he was a minor player in the emissions fraud and had been misled by more senior executives and lawyers at Volkswagen.
Another former Volkswagen executive, James Robert Liang, has pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy to defraud the US government and to violate the Clean Air Act. Liang, who worked at a Volkswa- gen testing centre in Oxnard, California, is cooperating with investigators and is awaiting sentencing.
Earlier in July, Italian Zaccheo Giovanni Pamio, who was head of thermodynamics in the engine development department at Volkswagen’s Audi division, was arrested by German authorities in Munich. His arrest was the first on German soil related to Volkswagen’s emissions fraud. Because he is not a German citizen, it is possible Pamio will be extradited to the United States. THE Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that US President Donald Trump said Apple has promised to expand manufacturing at home with three new US plants.
The Journal quoted Trump as saying that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook committed to building “three big plants,” in the United States.
No details were provided, and Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Cook in May announced the creation of an Apple fund to get more people in the US to do “advanced manufacturing”, kicking it off with a billion dollars.
Apple building plants in the United States would come as rare common ground with Trump.
Cook has pointed out that Apple spent more than $50 billion in the United States last year – buying from suppliers such as Corning Glass, working with developers behind applications for the California company’s devices and more.
Apple has about 80,000 employees in the US and plans to hire thousands more “in the future”, according to Cook.
It is a sign of Apple’s success but also a thorny problem: a cash stockpile topping a quarter of a trillion dollars, sparking debate on what do with such massive reserves.
The tech giant has resisted the idea of bringing the cash home, because the US tax code allows multinational firms to defer profits while they are held overseas but taxes income at up to 35 percent when repatriated.