Cooperation, payments to owners help VW avoid bigger penalty

DETROIT (AP) — By cooperating with federal investigators and quickly agreeing to compensate car owners, Volkswagen likely will avoid a massive criminal fine for cheating on diesel emissions tests and trying to cover it up.

The company on Friday pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and conspiracy over a brazen scheme to program nearly 600,000 vehicles to deceive the Environmental Protection Agency.

VW also agreed to pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties. While that is the largest-ever fine imposed by the U.S. government on an automaker, the company could have been on the hook for much more.

Federal sentencing guidelines called for fines from $17 billion to $34 billion due to the size of the plot and because VW employees destroyed documents and data after learning of the government investigation.

The crimes were wellplanned and “went to a very high level in the corporate structure,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Neal told the court.

VW won’t know its punishment for sure until sentenced April 21 by U.S. District Judge Sean Cox in Detroit. But prosecutors said that VW got a big discount on the penalty because it cooperated after fessing up to the crime.

The automaker’s general counsel, Manfred Doess, who was in court to agree to the plea, acknowledged the scheme lasted for nine years, from 2006 to 2015, and went to the level of just below the company’s management board.

VW attorney Jason Weinstein said VW’s cooperation enabled U.S. authorities to quickly file charges against six German supervisors in the case. Only one is in U.S. custody, though, and it’s unlikely the others will be extradited from Germany. One U.S. employee also was charged.

“I’ve never seen a company act more swiftly or aggressively to hold itself accountable for what it did wrong,” Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor, told the court.