A former Porsche top manager is said to have caused an accident involving injuries in South Africa in 2013 and made a driver’s escape. According to “Bild am Sonntag” was today’s VW CEO Matthias Müller his co-driver.
imago / high two
Wolfgang Hatz, Matthias Müller (Archive image from September 2015)
Sunday, 18.03.2018
11:51 clock
Former Porsche CEO Wolfgang Hatz allegedly caused a traffic accident in South Africa in February 2013. This reports the “Bild am Sonntag” citing the South African police in Rosedale (reference 263/02/13). The accident is said to have injured seven people. Manager Hatz had fled the accident site with a silver Porsche. According to the newspaper, the then Porsche CEO and today’s VW CEO sat Matthias Müller in the passenger seat.
The incident took place in the province of North Cape, where Volkswagen and other auto companies use a test track. Corporations are testing regular new vehicles and features there. On the way to the hotel Hatz had run over a red construction site traffic light and then drove two light trucks from the road, reports the “Bild am Sonntag”. Several passengers who were sitting in the back of the truck fell to the ground and injured themselves.
The situation on the ground should have been unclear. The former Porsche manager Hatz then drove on, reports the newspaper. “We investigate the driver of a Porsche test vehicle for reckless driving and accident flight,” quoted the “Bild am Sonntag” a South African policeman.
A Porsche spokesman confirmed to SPIEGEL ONLINE that Hatz had been involved in an accident that day. It was a group trip acted. A Volkswagen spokesman said that they had then turned on a lawyer, who said then that there was no investigation into a driver’s escape against manager Hatz. The spokesman did not want to comment that Müller sat in the car as a passenger.
An attorney of the former top manager Hatz told the “Bild am Sonntag” that he could not answer the questions within the given deadline because his client was in custody. An investigating judge in Munich ordered the arrest in September 2017, The US judiciary had previously suspected Hatz in 2016 as a possible “co-conspirator” in exhaust gas manipulation. He knew or at least overlooked it, investigators in the United States said. The lawyer of Hatz rejects the statements: The charges against Hatz allegations are wrong.
From 2001 to 2007, top manager Hatz was initially the head of engine development at Audi, then VW and, from 2011, development director of Porsche AG. Shortly after the announcement of the diesel affair in September 2015, Hatz was on leave from his executive post at Porsche.