The VW main owner Porsche SE is in connection with the diesel scandal with a shareholder action in the USA faced. The lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court of New York State is directed against Porsche SE and former members of the executive and supervisory boards of Volkswagen as well as other people, according to the interim report published on Tuesday by Porsche SE.
“The plaintiffs claim to be shareholders of Volkswagen AG and with their lawsuit are asserting alleged claims of Volkswagen AG on their behalf.” The lawsuit – a so-called derivative action – is based, among other things, on alleged breaches of duty under the German Stock Corporation Act and the German Corporate Governance Code.
The plaintiffs therefore want the court to determine that the defendant has breached its duties vis-à-vis Volkswagen and award the Wolfsburg-based group a claim for damages. Porsche Automobil Holding SE (PSE) is the largest shareholder in Volkswagen with 53.3 percent of the voting rights. The pleading submitted to the court in April 2021 has not yet been served on the PSE. Therefore, one could not give any information about the amount of compensation claimed, said a spokesman.
A derivative action or shareholder derivative suit is brought against a third party by one or more shareholders on behalf of a company. This third party is often a company insider, such as an officer, executive, or supervisory board member.
Pleasing business figures from Porsche
Porsche SE and Volkswagen have already faced billions in investor lawsuits in courts in Braunschweig and Stuttgart. The plaintiffs accuse the companies of having informed them too late about the diesel scandal and are demanding compensation for losses in the price of their shares.
Thanks to the high profits of the Volkswagen Group, the VW holding company Porsche SE also made excellent earnings in the first half of the year. The holding company posted an after-tax profit of a whopping 2.46 billion euros between January and the end of June, as the company announced in Stuttgart on Tuesday. In the same period of the previous year, the PSE was carried away by a weak VW balance sheet due to the crisis in the car industry at the beginning of the corona pandemic and had posted a loss of 329 million euros.
In view of the good first half of the year, PSE has recently started assuming higher profits for the year as a whole. This will probably be between 3.4 billion and 4.9 billion euros, it said. The forecast was updated at the end of July, previously the management around CEO and VW chief supervisor Hans Dieter Pötsch (70) assumed between 2.6 billion and 4.1 billion euros.