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The giant German automaker promised it would clean up its act after the Dieselgate scandal broke in 2015, in which it came out that the company’s employees were too scared to tell the CEO, Martin Winterkorn, that they didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of meeting targets for cutting emissions, so they just fiddled the test instead.

This cost the company about £30bn in fines and compensation. Winterkorn resigned after the scandal broke, but serious cases against him and four other senior executives continue.

The company appointed a director of integrity and legal affairs, and it set up a whistle-blower service to make sure that any wrongdoing could be dealt with. So far so good, until an executive reported various cyber security vulnerabilities at its payments arm that left it open to fraud and potential regulatory action, and was promptly fired a month later.

VW claims there was nothing relevant in the fired employee’s claims and that the employee was given the bullet for other reasons entirely, but commentators are raising a question mark about quite how much the company’s culture has really changed.

Its early history certainly doesn’t look pretty, kicking off with a close collaboration with Adolf Hitler to design an affordable people’s car that could transport two adults and three children at 100km/h. The company has admitted that it used slave labour from concentration camps during the war, but its recovery afterwards was an icon of Germany’s rebirth, and in 2016 and 2017 it was the largest carmaker in the world. Now it just needs to clean up its act.