Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen, was charged with conspiracy to defraud the US UU Related to the huge scandal of diesel emissions that has trapped the German automaker for almost three years. According to Bloomberg Winterkorn's indictment was revealed in federal court in Michigan on Thursday. The former CEO was also accused of violations of the Clean Air Act.
Winterkorn is the last former VW executive to face charges in the Dieselgate investigation, which has cost the automaker billions of dollars in fines and money settlement and has severely damaged its reputation on a global scale. Last December, Oliver Schmidt, former head of the environmental and engineering office of Volkswagen in the United States, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Former engineer James Liang was sentenced in August to 40 months in prison and fined $ 200,000.
Winterkorn resigned from VW fairly quickly after Dieselgate came to light in 2015. A year later, German prosecutors said they were investigating the former VW boss at the behest of the country's banking regulators. That investigation was not directly related to the deception itself, which saw millions of vehicles equipped with diesel equipped with software designed to evade emissions testing in order to meet the demands of fuel economy at the expense of the environment. But today's indictment of fraud charges appears to be linked to that expanding scandal.
