Light daylight falls through the windows of hall 141 of the Braunschweig district court on a Monday at the end of May. The wood paneling from American white oak looks sober, the jury -courtyard almost cool. At the end of a long criminal trial, four former Volkswagen managers hear their judgments that day. One buries the face in their hands: two years and seven months in prison. The co -accused a few meters further: four and a half years in prison. There are clear judgments. But they do not mark an end of the diesel scandal. All four are revision. And against the most prominent accused, the former VW boss Martin Winterkorn, will never be a judgment. The health of the 78 -year -old former manager is heavily struck, the process against him is temporarily set, so the status of processing is one of the largest industrial scandals. This Thursday he is the tenth anniversary. On September 18, 2015, in the middle of the IAA automotive exhibition, which took place in Frankfurt at the time, the news had burst that VW manipulated the exhaust gas values of millions of diesel cars. The “Notice of Violation” from the US environmental authority EPA triggered a storm. Winterkorn resigned five days later, in America there were billions in terms of billions and comparisons, and other countries had the group paid. At the same time, the defensive fight began. To this day, VW still states that the interference in the engine control was “only inadmissible under US law”. The board had no knowledge of this until shortly before the manipulations became known. Herbert Diess, one of Winterkorn’s successors, spoke openly about fraud in the summer of 2019, a few years after the scandal became known, instead of fraud instead of “diesel issue” – a break with the language rule that had been glossed over until then. But that was dismissed in the group as an unfortunate wording.
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