Ex-VW chief says he’d never heard term ‘defeat device’
BERLIN — Volkswagen’s former chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, yielded no ground Thursday during a polite grilling by German lawmakers over the automaker’s diesel emissions deception, but he astonished them by insisting he had not heard the term “defeat device” before September 2015, when the scandal broke.
Appearing in public for the first time since he resigned over the case, Winterkorn, 69, who worked at the company for more than 35 years, contended, as he has all along, that he had not been aware of any wrongdoing.
But his assertions are increasingly difficult to defend after Volkswagen pleaded guilty in the U.S. last week to criminal charges that included conspiracy to defraud the government, violations of the Clean Air Act and obstruction of justice. The company is paying $20 billion to resolve civil and criminal charges related to the scandal.
Winterkorn, who has not been charged, was chief executive throughout the decade when, as Volkswagen now admits, employees devised software, known as a “defeat device,” that could hide excess pollutants during testing by regulators. The employees, including several high-ranking managers, covered up the wrongdoing for years.
But Thursday, Winterkorn reiterated that he had not known of the efforts to evade emissions rules.
“How striving for perfection could end this way” mystified and preoccupied him, Winterkorn told a parliamentary committee charged with investigating the scandal. “The unthinkable has happened, and we must all deal with it.”
Any culpability on Winterkorn’s part would make Volkswagen more vulnerable to shareholder lawsuits. The lawsuits seek billions of dollars in damages.
Volkswagen’s plea agreement with the Department of Justice in Washington last week left no doubt that the fraud was the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of employees, rather than the result of a handful of rogue engineers as the company had first claimed. The settlement calls for the automaker to pay $4.3 billion in civil and criminal penalties to the U.S. government.
Herbert Behrens, the chairman of the investigating committee, described being incredulous when Winterkorn said he had not heard of the term “defeat device” before the scandal broke.
A Volkswagen executive indicted in the emissions scandal was arrested last week while vacationing in Miami. Five other Volkswagen executives were also indicted, but they are still in Germany, which does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S.