The former AudiChief Rupert Stadler has never made a secret of the fact that he is in the Diesel affair completely wrong for fraud brought to justice sees. When he spoke for the first time on Tuesday, the 19th day of his main hearing, the rather brittle business economist became almost emotional by his standards.
The prosecutors abused him as a “figurehead” and instrumentalized the process politically, Stadler concluded his statement in the afternoon, louder and more fluent than in the three hours before. The prosecutors had “not the right to deliberately treat me worse than other parties to the proceedings”. He expects “fair and absolutely neutral treatment by the authorities”.
At least that’s how Stadler sees it, the opposite has been the case so far. According to him, the false statements of the also accused engine developer Giovanni P., the prosecutors’ key witness, were made the basis for his pre-trial detention in the summer of 2019. The public prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, often disregards what exonerates him.
Stadler emphasizes that he tried everything to get his employees to investigate. Again and again he asked the technicians to “let their pants down”, sent them the internal audit department and started amnesty programs. Without success. The fact that the prosecutors inferred from this, however, that his educational efforts were unsuitable, was “arbitrary, unfounded and one-sided”.
He asks militantly: “What can one expect from a public prosecutor who constantly gives the impression of being biased?”
“Camouflaging and deceiving was part of a work culture, maybe also a culture of fear”
What my own mistake as a longtime CEO of the Volkswagen-Daughter is concerned, Stadler has little to contribute in his statement. Only this much: he blames himself “personally” for not having succeeded in preventing the economic and reputational damage for Audi.
It was only “with the subsequent knowledge from intensive study of files” that he discovered “all the more painfully” what “serious undesirable developments” prevailed in the development of diesel engines. “Over a long period of time, camouflage and deception were part of a work culture, and perhaps also a culture of fear.” In contrast, he himself always strived for an open and honest company culture.
But why did it fail so dramatically? How could the most important technicians – as Stadler puts it – still lie to their CEO and claim that the diesel engines of the cars produced for Europe were not manipulated when the scandal occurred United States was blown long ago?
Such questions will not be asked on Tuesday, because Stadler’s defense lawyers will not allow questions to their clients for the time being. The public prosecutors accuse Stadler of “fraud by omission”; he should have stopped the sale of diesel cars in Europe after the manipulation by the US environmental agency EPA was discovered in autumn 2015.
Stadler insists that the board of directors is not criminally accused, not even organizational failure. The committee had “taken all necessary organizational measures and with regard to the design of guidelines to enable employees to work in accordance with the rules”.
Delivered to the technicians as a business economist
Instead, what Stadler is talking about sounds more like a conspiracy by the technicians. After the tampering with VW four-cylinder engines in the USA in September 2015, the head of Audi diesel engine development, Ulrich W., assured the Audi board that “the V6 TDI has no test stand detection”. At Audi, the principle “role equals road” applies. For the Audi board of directors, “the dimensions and complexity were in no way assessable or tangible”. As a business economist, he understood little of the technical details anyway.
The shock was all the greater when the US authorities discovered illegal software in the V6 engine in November 2015. But even then the technicians would have assured the Audi board of directors that “the six-cylinder diesel complies with the European approval requirements”. Because this has a completely different warm-up function than that in the USA. Audi agreed with the Federal Motor Transport Authority (Kraftfahrtbundesamt) for a voluntary service campaign to exchange software. But by January 2018, 120,000 cars with excessive nitrogen oxide emissions had been sold in Europe.
Stadler explains in detail how he flew to the USA in a company aircraft in November 2015. An Audi delegation led by head of diesel engine development W. and the defendant P. had an appointment with the US environmental authorities. Stadler wanted to support the team and explain to the authorities his serious will to clarify. Ultimately, on the advice of the lawyers, he left it there with a phone call from the hotel to the authorities. The lawyers said it was unusual for a CEO to be present at such meetings.
The key witness and the red wine accident
He met P. there for the first time and remembered him straight away, because he was sitting next to him at dinner and accidentally poured half a glass of red wine on his trousers. P. did not use this or any other opportunity to inform Stadler about the manipulations. P.’s earlier statement that he was “not allowed to participate in talks with the US authorities because he wanted to clarify” is a legend, “said Stadler.
In any case, the public prosecutor’s office has misconceptions about the structures in a large industrial group like Volkswagen with 600,000 employees, 90,000 of them at Audi alone. His calendar was full of meetings after meetings, the executive bodies in Ingolstadt and Wolfsburg, the various strategy committees and other committees. Most of the 200 to 300 emails that he received every day as CEO, he never saw. Major decisions were made every ten minutes, and he even took one or two mailboxes home with him for the weekend.
Normally, he would only have received five to ten “blue reports” about problems in person per year. He has no recollection that at the damage table where problems were discussed, he himself was also concerned with the problem of exhaust gas cleaning.
Defenders want to overturn the process because of Corona
In the morning, P.’s defense attorney Walter Lechner (80) came forward with criticism of the court, considering the new infection situation, an unchanged continuation of the process was “irresponsible” and possibly a “ticking time bomb”. Stadler’s lawyer Thilo Pfordte later suggests the same notion: The court should once again obtain an expert opinion, taking into account the virus mutation, to determine whether infection protection is still guaranteed.
Because of corona The main hearing takes place two days a week in the modern courtroom of the Munich-Stadelheim correctional facility, as it is particularly large, six meters high and equipped with a state-of-the-art ventilation system. Just with judges, lay judges, prosecutors, defendants and their defense lawyers, two dozen people who do not wear a mask come together here twice a week. There are also up to twenty representatives from the media and the public wearing masks.
Judge Stefan Weickert sees this as being sufficient to protect against infection. “Maintaining justice is also systemically important.”