VW executive is sentenced to seven years in prison in diesel emissions case.
A top Volkswagen official in the United States was sentenced Wednesday to seven years in prison for his role in the German automaker’s decadelong scheme to cheat on diesel emissions tests.
The sentencing of Oliver Schmidt, a former Volkswagen manager in Michigan, was the latest turn in a vast scandal that has tarnished the company’s reputation and has cost the carmaker more than $20 billion in fines and settlements.
The sentence, including a fine of $400,000, was imposed by Judge Sean F. Cox in U.S. District Court in Detroit four months after Schmidt, 48, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the federal government and to violating the Clean Air Act. The sentence was in line with the prosecution’s recommendation.
Schmidt, a citizen of Germany, is the highestranking Volkswagen employee to be convicted in the scheme in the United States. His case underscores the Justice Department’s commitment to indicting and prosecuting participants in the company’s efforts to rig pollution tests on hundreds of thousands of diesel vehicles imported for sale in the U.S. market.
But most of those suspected of conspiring to defraud U.S. regulators are out of reach of American justice in Germany, which normally does not extradite its citizens. Schmidt may turn out to suffer the harshest punishment for the emissions fraud even though he was hardly the only participant or the highest ranking.
Schmidt’s arrest in January, more than a year after the scandal erupted, was something of a fluke. Having been transferred back to Germany, he came to the U.S. for a vacation with his wife and was seized as he waited for a departing flight in Miami. Why he risked arrest by traveling to the U.S. is still a mystery.
Schmidt had been a Volkswagen employee since 1997 and was named general manager of the company’s engineering and environmental office in Auburn Hills, Mich., in 2013. He was responsible for the automaker’s relations with the federal and California regulatory agencies that initially pursued the emissions cheating case.