Former VW boss exits Porsche
FORMER Volkswagen (VW) CEO Martin Winterkorn has left Porsche Automobil Holding, VW’s biggest shareholder, succumbing to pressure to cut his ties amid a cheating scandal.
FORMER Volkswagen (VW) CEO Martin Winterkorn has stepped down from his post running Porsche Automobil Holding, VW’s biggest shareholder, succumbing to pressure to cut his ties amid an investigation into cheating on emissions tests.
VW chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch, who sits on the Porsche board, would take over from Mr Winterkorn on November 1, the Stuttgart-based company said. The holding company, controlled by the Porsche and Piëch families, owns more than half of VW’s voting shares.
While the Porsche-Piëch family was initially willing to stick it out with Mr Winterkorn, who resigned as VW CEO last month, labour leaders and the German state of Lower Saxony had been pushing for him to leave so that the German car manufacturer could make a fresh start following the admission of cheating on US emissions tests, people familiar with the matter said.
The two groups have influence at VW because Lower Saxony owns 20% of the voting stock and labour officials hold half the seats on VW’s supervisory board.
“It’s a good sign but it comes very late,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Centre for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
“Anything else would have been unimaginable.”
Talks were under way for Mr Winterkorn to leave his remaining posts as chairman of VW’s publicly traded Audi brand and the group’s truck holding company, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.
Fallout from the cheating scandal has spread to encompass 11-million cars internationally. Cleaning up the mess would cost much more than the €6.5bn VW had already set aside, Mr Winterkorn’s replacement as CEO, Matthias Müller, has said.
On Friday VW announced that Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt, compliance chief at rival Daimler, would join the car maker to take over a new VW management board position focused on integrity and legal affairs. She is the first outsider hired for a top post at VW since the beginning of the scandal.
Mr Winterkorn took the position of Porsche CEO in 2009, after the company’s planned takeover of VW failed because of ballooning debt. Working with then chairman Ferdinand Piëch, he helped arrange a fix that gave VW the Porsche sportscar brand and solidified the families’ control over the carmaking group via the holding company.
Yesterday French police raided VW’s French headquarters in their probe into the emissions scandal. Police in Italy also raided VW’s offices last week.